Young the Giant returns to USC to rock the Religious Center

Varun Soni, the USC Dean of Religious Life, had the band Young the Giant surprise USC students Wednesday afternoon with an impromptu concert at the University Religious Center, also known as URC.

Young the Giant are an American rock band who have two Billboard top 10 albums and over five million monthly listeners on Spotify.

This is not the first time Sameer Gadhia, lead singer and co-founder of the band, has performed at USC.

“When we first started as a band, we used to always come to USC and just play random pop-up shows,” Gadhia said. “Just going back to our roots.”

Sameer also visited USC twice in 2020: once to perform and another time to talk to students with the band at Bovard Auditorium, where Soni and Gadhia initially met.

“They came to USC to do a panel discussion about some of the themes of their albums, which deal with migration and identity and belonging. And I really admired how profound they were,” Soni said about his inspiration for hosting the concert. “We all lived in Venice, and I just kind of got to know them over the years and became a huge fan.”

The world renowned rock band found themselves in one of USC’s more intimate venues Wednesday afternoon, performing on the steps of a building where students pray and worship. The band recently released their album American Bollywood, which deals with themes of immigration and spirituality, making the center a fitting place for their performance.

Most students crowded together at URC, stopping by the pop-up concert to enjoy the music. Other students even became part of the music.

“I think I’m still processing. I think I’m in shock,” said Belle Wang, a senior who was invited to play viola with Young the Giant. “To always hear an artist’s music and then to finally be able to play with them, especially in front of a live audience, I think that’s something that I never thought I would be doing today.”

The band needed string instruments for their show and invited a quartet of USC performance students to play with them last minute. They rehearsed together for the first time before the performance, much to the delight of the student performers who are all longtime fans of the band.

“It was amazing. We were sitting there, we were playing, our arms were swinging. We were just in the motion of the song,” said Evan Ilafet, a senior majoring in violin performance who played Wednesday. “We were vibing, we were going. A little scratch here, a little missed note there, but that’s fine. You know, it is not classical music. This is not Schubert. This is Young the Giant.”

Ilafet’s enthusiasm was shared by many of the band’s fans, many of whom have grown up with the ever-changing styles of Young the Giant.

“They started in high school. Like their first song was ‘My Body,’ that’s a fun high school, college-sort of fraternity song,” Soni said. “But now, 13 years later, they’re singing about migration, memory, family history, spirituality. These are really profound sort of themes that the band themselves grew into. They’re no longer in high school; they’re in their early thirties. They have kids, right? So they’re growing into their art as they’re growing into their life and they’re bringing their audience with them.”

These themes of growth and finding identity in America also tap into the issue of media representation in America.

Soni said that for Indian Americans, there has been a dearth of Indian role models in media “other than Deepak Chopra and Apu from ‘The Simpsons.’”

“And now my children are growing up and they’re seeing Indian-Americans in all these different positions and all these different places,” Soni said. “And their possibilities are greater because they see that they can do anything”

Thanks to Sameer, Soni said his kids can now aspire to be a “rock stars.”

“The last South Asian lead singer of a famous rock band was Freddie Mercury,” Soni said. “To see like an Indian American from Irvine — I’m an Indian American; I’m from Irvine — achieve that level of rock stardom, it hits close to home personally

“Nothing is more American than rock ‘n’ roll,” said Soni.