Seniors at my school were allowed to nominate songs for class song. I’m not sure how the system for picking the songs worked, but I would assume that the songs with the most votes would appear on the ballot. I received said ballot today and the songs listed were:
“I Believe I Can Fly” by R. Kelley
“You’re Gonna Miss This” by Trace Atkins
“Time of Your Life (Good Riddance)” by Green Day
“My Wish” by Rascal Flatts
My first thought after seeing this was “Wow. What a crap fest,” or something along those lines. My senior class was able to pick the most generic group of songs I’ve ever seen. To be fair, “I Believe I Can Fly” is not an awful song, but I certainly would not say it is good either. Modern country all sounds the same and the songs have terrible lyrics that try to mean something but fail by being completely unoriginal or by sounding like they were written by a ten-year old child. Believe me, I have no issue with country music like Johnny Cash or Townes Van Zandt, but Rascal Flatts is probably one of the worst bands of all time. The main problem with “Time of Your Life” is that it is most likely a nomination at every school every year since the song was released. It’s an okay song, but I got sick of it long ago.
I have decided that I will either vote for “I Believe I Can Fly,” the lesser of four evils, or do a write-in vote for something better, but that’s probably not allowed. My advice to Dallastown’s Class of 2010 would be to broaden your minds beyond the modern mainstream music that is played on the radio, and see what happens next.
Funny thing: I graduated from high school in 1999 (10 years ago, sigh) and two of those songs (“I Believe I Can Fly” and “Time of Your Life”) were nominated for our class song. We ended up going with “I’ll be missing you” by Puff Daddy, but amended it a month or so later to “Stairway to Heaven.”
I know this is trite, but the more things change, the more they stay the same.