There’s a category of music that falls somewhere between pop and alternative rock. It’s clean-cut and middle of the road. You won’t find any political messages in the lyrics, and you’ll certainly never hear the F-word. You know the type. It’s the kind of music heard on a radio station that plays everything from Celine Dion and Shania Twain to Matchbox Twenty and Hootie and the Blowfish — “The best of the ’80s, ’90s and today.” Star 102.5 is our Central Iowa equivalent.The music industry trade magazines call it AAA, or adult album alternative. It’s also sometimes called adult contemporary. I’ll call it the Triple-A Club.For Veishea ’98, the Veishea committee booked a band that falls into this AAA category — the pop-rock band Tonic (remember them?).Then they covered all the bases by adding to the lineup two more cutting-edge bands that appeal to those with alternative music taste — the Crystal Method and the Flaming Lips Experiment. Electronica duo The Crystal Method closed out the concert and wound up stealing the show; everyone had a great time as we tore out the seats in Hilton to make way for dancing. This was the ideal Veishea lineup. This year’s lineup similarly will be headlined by a mainstream band — RCA recording artist Vertical Horizon, a straight-laced group that grew out of Georgetown University. The band is riding on the success of the singles “You’re a God” and “Everything You Want.” Though it’s great that they’ve booked a band with mainstream popularity, the Veishea entertainment committee has left a hole for those of us who like to go beyond the limits of pre-packaged pop in our music listening tastes. It’s inevitable that with a student population of about 25,000, the Veishea entertainment committee has to pick a band that has wide appeal.Vertical Horizon certainly has wide appeal. Everyone from boy-band-obsessed teeny boppers to 35-year-old yuppies has caught the Vertical Horizon virus. There’s nothing wrong with this style of music. A lot of people like it. In that sense it’s an ideal choice for Veishea, which is supposed to be a celebration for the entire Iowa State community. It’s good, clean, wholesome and most importantly, popular.This week, in fact, Vertical Horizon’s hit single “Everything You Want” sits at No. 20 on Billboard’s Adult Top 40 chart. But there is one problem: We’re not adults in the adult contemporary sense of the word — we’re college students. College is a time for an us-against-them mentality. We’re supposed to be cutting-edge and counter-cultural. It’s a time to be loud and rambunctious, a time to challenge your own views and to expand your horizons. Any music critic will tell you — Vertical Horizon is a flash-in-the-pan pop act. They’ll put out maybe one or two albums on a major label, sell millions of records and fade back into oblivion. It won’t be the first time a band with “mass appeal” vanishes into thin air. See if you remember any of these casualties of the Triple-A Club —The Gin Blossoms, Better Than Ezra, Dishwalla, The Spin Doctors, The Verve Pipe, Marcy Playground, The Rembrandts, Sister Hazel, Deep Blue Something. These are all bands who were all over commercial radio in the early to mid-’90s. Chances are, you’ve forgotten about them, or at least, you’re not listening to them anymore. They sold millions of records, dominated radio airwaves, and looking back, they didn’t really mean very much to anyone. It’s not music that you could listen to 20 years down the road and say, “That Gin Blossoms album was so revolutionary, it stands the test of time as one of the greatest recordings of the ’90s.”When you look back at the 1960s, a lot of great bands come to mind. The Beatles, The Who, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Velvet Underground. What a great crop of bands for the youth culture to identify with. These bands defined our parent’s generation. Do you really think Vertical Horizon and legions of like-minded bands will have enough impact to define our generation? Sure they will have made a lot of money, but does that mean they were good? The current musical climate isn’t pushing the envelope, and it’s because of straight-laced bands like Vertical Horizon. The record industry would rather pour a lot of money into hyping a band so that they can sell 10 million copies of one album, instead of two million copies each of five albums. This leads to virtually no artist development. Iowa State seems to think we need good, clean, wholesome, family-friendly entertainment for Veishea. This should not mean that we don’t have the capacity to enjoy more artistically significant music. I would like to give the students of Iowa State more credit than that. We’re not as musically sheltered as people think we are. We don’t all listen to pre-packaged pop that has no staying power. It was a good idea to book a band with wide appeal, and it could’ve been done by satisfying both music fanatics and mainstream music listeners. For example, Moby has a current Top 40 hit called “South Side.” His album “Play” was also was considered by critics to be one of the best albums of 1999. What was accomplished with Veishea ’98?Just because we live in Iowa and we’re going to school in a rural state doesn’t mean we have shallow musical taste. We’re not afraid to expand our horizons. The Veishea entertainment committee should keep that in mind next time they’re booking a headlining act. Conor Bezane is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Chicago. He is arts & entertainment editor of the Daily.