I graduated high school a mere year and a half ago. Literally, only 18 months ago I had to worry about high school football games, popularity and whether or not my voice would ever hit puberty (still waiting). Those thoughts, along with other now seemingly meaningless conceptions of high school life, currently mean absolutely nothing to me.
However, in high school I always prided myself in knowing what was “cool,” and entering college, I hoped to remain on top of pop culture. For the most part, I felt I had; I truly believed that I could go blow-for-blow on TRL trivia with any belly button-pierced, metal-mouthed, American Eagle-tagged, high school blonde. Man, was I wrong.
Current high school pop culture is about as foreign to me as grammar is to most of the Celtics. I polled high school students from three separate regions to find out what was cool: the East (BU’s own BU Academy), the Midwest (Lincolnshire, Illinois’ Stevenson High School) and the West (my alma mater, Monte Vista High School of Danville, Calif.). While this is far from a proper sample for what they shared to be referred to as fact, I remain dumbfounded at many of their responses.
Who in the world is Chad Michael Murray? “Las Vegas” as the coolest show on television? Are Beyonce and Evanescence really the coolest in music? I really, really hope not.
The more and more I listened to and read the high school students’ responses, the more I realized that I cared much less that I was out of the loop, and much more about what they were saying was in the loop. What I currently watch on television, download on KaZaA and fork over $10 at Loews Boston Common did not appear in any of their responses. This perplexed me to no end; thus, I researched the aforementioned responses.
Chad Michael Murray is the star of the WB’s “One Tree Hill,” a show with a plot line summary on Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) that is so confusing, I stopped reading it by the fourth sentence. For starters, look at the title: I might be out of it, but I would have to be blind to not notice the similarity between the recently wrapped “Dawson’s Creek.” I did take geography in elementary school and I did learn that a “tree” and a “hill” are both geographical features. Furthermore, Murray seems to just be the WB guy of the moment, falling into the failed footsteps of that “Smallville” guy, the males in “Felicity” and every masculine character that drowned — I mean graced — the set of the “Creek.”
As for NBC’s “Las Vegas,” starring that Tad Hamilton guy, well I didn’t really think anyone watched that show. Trust me, I love Vegas. I loved The Cooler and admire Swingers to no end. I even salivate over “Vegas” co-star Molly Sims. But should anyone really be watching a show that is using a guest appearance by Jean-Claude Van Damme to boost its ratings? In my mind the only van worth watching is Chris Farley’s down by the river, which ironically is where I think this show will be by the end of the season.
As disturbed as I was to hear about the television selections, I was far more perturbed with the mention of Beyonce and Evanescence as the music industry’s cool artists. In fact, I was so upset to hear those two names that I desperately sought other names from MTV.com. The result was an onslaught of Fefe Dobson praise. I always pictured the name Fefe being the name of a poodle belonging to some aristocratic mom from Long Island. Instead, it is the name of the worst Canadian pop singer since last year’s “anti-Britney” Avril Lavigne. What her website describes as “raw riffs” are about as horrendous and unpleasing as unwrapped Halloween candy.
Okay, I’m going to be nice now. The thing I learned most from this whole exercise is that I have really grown up in the past year and a half. Simply, what I think is cool is not what I thought was cool in high school. Stevenson High’s Michelle LaCognata, the instructor behind the school’s pop culture club, said her highlight upon quizzing her class with my questions was “the sea of blank stares when I asked if any of them had seen ‘Lost in Translation.” The Sofia Coppola movie and its stars, singer-songwriter Howie Day, HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Brooke Burke and many others – that’s what I think is cool.
Maybe the high school kids are right -maybe I should really want to win a date with Tad Hamilton. Or listen to Blink-182. Or even wear Abercrombie ‘ Fitch head to toe like the good old days. Maybe not.
Michael Metz is a sophomore in the
College of Communication.