by Benjy Berkowitz ’18, Staff Writer 

I’m sure you are all familiar with LumeNAtion. If somehow you are not, it is Newark Academy’s beloved and award-winning competitive acapella group. They perform wonderful arrangements of hit songs like Castle by Halsey and You Don’t Know You’re Beautiful by One Direction. They manage to encompass a wide range of timbres throughout their performances, many of which sound reminiscent of the source material.

But no matter how much I enjoy LumeNAtion’s arrangements and performances, I can’t help but find myself thinking one thought: Wouldn’t this be like so much better with instruments?  Nom no, voice is great and all, downright impressive, I must say. But we invented instruments for a reason. And to throw that reason to the wind, I would say, is downright blasphemous.

If you had a pencil and had to take a test, you would not decide to break that pencil in half, burn a stick and take the test using that as your writing utensil of choice. Why wouldn’t you? Because pencils were made for a reason.

Would you slash your car’s tires and cut out the bottom and push it with your feet like a Flintstones car? No!

Would you put your phone in a microwave and then tie two cans together with string to talk to your friends, and then when you wanted to talk to a different friend you’d have to take the first friend’s can and go give it to the other friend, and even if you went through all that you would still have a 10-foot maximum range on your call? I don’t think you would, would you?

So why strip ourselves of the musical advances humanity has made? Is it because giving yourself constraints can lead to more creative thinking and interesting new outcomes? That’s absurd.

Just imagine this, LumeNAtion gets on stage, lights go up, Jake McEvoy grabs the mic, but right before he starts to sing a curtain drops revealing a whole band just waiting to fill your ear drums with the full, satisfying sound of a complete ensemble. Sounds pretty nice, right? (To be fair, I, as a drummer, would be in that band behind the curtain.)

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for LumeNAtion and acapella as a whole, but I know for a fact that there is room for improvement. But no matter what anyone says, Pitch Perfect 3 is a hell of a film.