High School Confidential

By Ben Brenner

	Ben Brenner is a senior at Somers High.

I am 17 and my mind is a host for contradictions, a target for distractions, and a victim of conflicting desires. At seventeen I am more clueless and more knowledgeable than I have ever been, and as I gain wisdom I distance myself further from the things I know.

I have experienced love and hate, victory and defeat, ecstasy and depression and every single variation in between. I learn from mistakes, but make the same mistakes again. Today I am anxious for tomorrow, but tomorrow I will miss today. The freedom and pressures of time are preying on me every second. I have realized that nothing is concrete, and that the entropy of time muddles everything, and at 17 I may be more confused than ever.

I wake up every weekday and I tell myself I need to go to bed earlier. Through a haze of grogginess, I think, “Alright you won’t have too much to do tonight; you need to catch up on some sleep.” Nine o’clock arrives and I haven’t showered, I haven’t practiced for my SAT’s, and I haven’t done any homework, and the strangest aspect of my night is that I am content with leaving everything until the last possible minute. I know I will regret it when I awake the next morning, I know I will wake up and tell myself the same thing I told myself the day before, and I know that it is all lies. I undergo this constant cycle of regrets and joys in every aspect of my life. My parents, teachers, sports, society, all press for order, for organization, for time management. At 17, I seldom see its benefits, because I seldom care enough to keep my life according to a schedule. Despite this flaw in my character, I now see a beauty in the chaos of my life. I live my life by nature’s law of entropy, the tendency of everything to disorganize, to never show a single sign of repetition.

Everything in my life is temporary, because my life reshapes itself with every second that passes. The most basic instinct within me constantly reminds me that life is ever-changing, and I value life’s dynamics. I am the recent recipient of a driver’s license, one year away from being eligible for the draft, four years away from being legal to drink. The thrill of driving has just begun, but my basic instinct reminds me that the thrill will eventually pass, and sooner or later I will be looking for rides so I don’t have to pay for gas. The idea of being drafted, of fighting in a war seems outrageous, yet my basic instinct tells me that in one year the idea will be no less frightening, but far more realistic. I always imagine what it will be like to be able to drink a beer in a bar watching the game on Sunday with friends, but my basic instinct tells me the best times I will ever have drinking will probably be before I am 21.

When I was thirteen I took a white water rafting trip down the Colorado River with my father. For those seven days I was overcome by emotion. I loved the scenery surrounding me because of its natural beauty, but I feared being so far from civilization. I loved the water because it cooled and refreshed me, but dreaded its falls and terrifying motions beyond each bend in the river. Sleeping under the stars was incredible, yet waking up to five o’clock rays of sun was treacherous. It was chaotic and it was beautiful in its chaos. Reflecting back, it is the joy and beauty, not the uncertainty and fear of the river that I remember best.

Years from now, as I reminisce on the age of seventeen, I am optimistic that it will be the bliss of my crazed seventeenth year, not the distress that implants its lasting mark forever in my memory.

By Jeff Zalesin

	The author is a sophmore at Briarcliff High School, where he is arts editor and writer for student newspaper The Briarcliff Bulletin.

In 1965, NBC decided it was time for rock n’ roll to have its own sitcom. Riding the wave of “Beatlemania”" that swept the western world throughout the mid-60s, the network created a fictional band that mirrored the Fab Four right down to the artfully misspelled animal name.

The Monkees, though short lived as TV characters, moved on to impressive success as pop stars in the “real” music world, scoring an impressive run of hit singles that still haven’t ceased to grace the radio airwaves. By the time they disbanded in 1971, they had paved the way for countless other TV-to-pop charts crossover acts, as well as my rabbi’s hairstyle.

But, like any other enduring species, the TV-produced music star was bound to evolve. Over 40 years after the Monkees first rocked the living room TV set, the music industry is still discovering new ways to turn fake artists into real money. While the Monkees” success banked on smart, enduring pop songs as much as their on-screen personas, it is now possible to sell millions of records purely on the strength of meticulously calculated marketing.

And where music publishing was once the domain of a few dedicated music labels, none of these now seem able to keep up with the Disney Channel.

With High School Musical and Hannah Montana, Disney took two seemingly innocent television productions and turned them into record-smashing phenomena. The High School Musical soundtrack outsold any other record last year in the United States, with the companion CD to this year’s High School Musical 2 also tearing up the charts.

Hannah’s no commercial slouch, either; her “Best of Both Worlds” concert tour is this year’s hottest ticket, having sold out even faster than perennial road-king Bruce Springsteen. Want a prime ticket for one of Hannah’s shows when the tour stops in New Jersey? Nine thousand dollars on the ticket-scalping site StubHub should do it.

Disney’s key to manufacturing such unprecedented musical stardom for their TV characters is simple: know your audience. After years of creating shows for the pre-teen market, Disney knows just how to craft the kind of characters and plotlines that have turned the American youth into the world’s token couch potatoes. Add the right sprinkling of sing-along anthems, and an epidemic of obsession is born. It’s only logical, then, that fans of the TV shows will be happy to spend their allowance dollars on “albums” of songs from favorite episodes.

The use of TV characters to sell simple pop tunes is hardly a new idea; every TV-produced musical act since the Monkees has centered on it. But for the future of popular music, the implications of the Disney music craze transcend the contents of your sister’s iPods. Where the fictional pop acts of yesterday were content to pay clever homage to their musical heroes, those of today are poised to stand aside them. For legions of young Americans, Hannah Montana is every bit as “real” as any other artist; her origins as a TV persona only add to her stature as a pop music icon.

Older music lovers may look upon all this with despair, ruing the day when Hollywood learned to corrupt the youthful idea of artistry. But have the Monkees of yesteryear truly evolved into chart-hoarding monsters? Or has the traditional music industry let its once-great circus of top artists degenerate into a sleepy petting zoo?

Despite the ongoing decline of record sales, today’s labels are unwilling to take the kind of bold, adventurous risks that once made popular music so vital and exciting. Top radio stations are content to play the same predictable sounds at nauseam, while the most inventive acts have no greater champion than college radio.

Even those who score major hits are generally find themselves confined by the borders of generation and subculture. When the music business seems bored with itself, it should hardly come as a surprise that the youngest listeners hardly feel compelled to stick with “real” artists.

How did the adolescent stars of the Disney Channel overtake the position once reserved for the most elite musical talents? The answer has little to do with the performers themselves. Rather, the sickly music business has become so feeble and uninspired that an innocent gimmick is now enough to conquer its top position. It’s a reality that the dominance of fictional music in the mainstream has gotten out of hand. But if the music industry hopes to regain its footing on both commercial and artistic ground, it has bigger problems than Hannah Montana to face.