We All Know the Lyrics of the Millennial-Gen-Z divide
Today I will be engaging in the discourse, all thanks to Shloka. I smiled the entire time while typing this ode to a main character and I hope that this simple pop and dance joy finds you wherever you may be. HSM is a good look at the adolescent experience, but it’s no longer just a neutral one. It makes me wish that my own teenage years had been so easy. What about the films captured the imaginations of us real kids, and how is that wonder is now bound up in the fun of social media apps used by younger generations? This piece is very long so don’t gulp it all down at once.
The High School Musical franchise was woven into the fabric of the Gen Z by-way-of-Millennial cultural tapestry fifteen years ago. In fact, some could argue that the films serve as a generational divide between these two age-categories, by asking its viewers to suspend their disbelief and bop to the top of their tolerance of pop-culture standards. Were you carried by this train of corny or were you already too ironic to hop on, or had you actually experienced too much high school to truly be musical about it?
With its signature wild-cat red, white and gold the film attempts to be Grease’s unwritten third instalment meets Romeo and Juliet meets sports psychology, and is one of the biggest Disney Channel Original Movie successes, that had 8 million viewers tuned in during its premiere. I’m going to try and gather my thoughts about this franchise and its star dazzling characters like a drama assistant gathering tulle.
The film follows East High Wildcat basketball star Troy Bolton, and his shy — prone to giggling at chemistry equations — girlfriend Gabriella Montez. They are not underdogs; they are hardly underrepresented and yet their archetypes provided new language and story to pre-teens all around the world to codify their own coming-of-age-experiences.
When speaking to my mother about the effect High School Musical (from herein referred to as HSM) had on me she said, “Yes, I remember you being into it. Like everyone else your age at that time. But it wasn’t something that you thought was cringey or wasn’t cool.”
For the longest time I continued thinking that the films weren’t cringey at all — even if I presented as an aloof adolescent and then later as serious music-collector that only watched Truffaut. Beneath the bravado of knowing better — knowing the grit of life better than these franchised films — I still believed in their myth. That the choice between basketball and theatre was worth singing about and giving language to. It still makes me happy to know that choreographer Charles Klapow won an Emmy for Outstanding Choreography his work on HSM.
I didn’t think the films were cringey because when watching them it wasn’t my developed self who was watching, but my impressionable self; the child self who still wanted to know they’d all be in it together in the end.
Retrospect, with all the wisdom and disbelief that goes with it, had no hold on me; not in 2008 when HSM3 was released; not in 2011 when I was in the throes of my MCR and Death Cab for Cutie obsession; not in 2015 when I turned 18. Probably only this year have I begun to pick and fray the shiny plastic on the DVD boxset-case.
I can still see past the clumsy post-production overdubbing; the fact that the microphone can be held at arm’s length, but the character’s vocals don’t change; and the irony of Troy’s friends singing out of frustration that he’s taken up singing. And if I could fix one of many things from the first movie, it would definitely be the opening title font embossed on the establishing shot of the ski lodge. Also, the line delivery in the first film is pretty stunted, but I don’t care I’m a total Kelsi. My cousins and I rehearsed the All in this Together dance moves and made a Microsoft Office 2003 Power Point Presentation on a dial up desktop computer comparing Zanessa vs Zashley. Yeah.
I can see past these missteps with a new lens that isn’t clouded with that same endearment now (though I will always find Troy’s tooth gap in the first movie completely endearing, and the most endearing thing about both Troy Bolton and William Dafoe are their respective tooth gaps).
Neither is my lens imbued with so much pride as it was before. Which is not to say that we — the children — had anything to do with the production of HSM or its message, unless you voted in on radio Disney to cast set changes and which sandwiches they ate for HSM2. But HSM was created with us in mind — to impress on us. I was proud producers and writers thought we were worth so much colour and shirt-over-t-shirt apparel. The franchise and these character arcs were made to cater to what they — the adults — thought we needed. And what they thought we needed was a liberation from binaries.
They thought we needed to be wary of dancing along to herd mentality when we ourselves know that we like to ‘pop’, ‘lock’ and ‘jam’. They thought we needed to be given more than fast-tracks to sports scholarships, no more ball is life, how bout Crème Brule? They thought we needed to be reminded that inconsiderate friends are not friends at all, just social climbers more ready to cancel us than champion changing our minds.
They didn’t think we needed Zac Efron’s singing voice in the first movie (except in the balcony scene at least thank God). They didn’t think we needed the moms to say more than two lines each. If you view the films with a Queer Narrative Framework lens, they could have qualified more of Ryan’s character growth, especially out of his sister’s shadow. If you view the films without colour blindness then Chad’s motivations and overcompensations in the first film to supress Troy’s dreams could be brought into sharper focus and bring up the conflict of Chad having to work hard for basketball and social rankings, while Troy is brought into that privilege; and using that same racial framework, it makes you wonder about a lot of the black character’s in the film: such as the black nerd telling Martha not to break-dance in ‘Stick to the Status Quo’, and shutting a book in her face, is he okay? The producers didn’t think to not let Sharpay and Ryan appropriate Hawaiian mele Hula. They didn’t think that secondary characters such as Taylor or Jason should have interesting interior lives.
They didn’t even contain enough human possibility, nuance or complexity in their main character Troy Bolton.
What bookends the end of the ‘let’s tune in’ era of pre-teen self-actualisation is the internet age, the social media age and the endless possibilities that apps present for pre-teens who want to record themselves, their stories and aesthetics. TikTok perfectly fractionally distillates the oldest and the youngest of Gen-Z, separating out those who are still willing to plug into the quick-paced nature of popular culture with those who are content not to know any better of the trends; since getting older often means getting more comfortable with not knowing all of the words, or holding on as tightly to popular social capital, and the gaze of your peers. I am particular interested in what GenZ and Millenial groups because I was born in 1997. Pew Research Centre decided a year ago to use 1996 as the last birth year for Millennials for their future work, but other research centres go as far as including 1999, or just split straight through 1997 to acknowledge the overlap of generational identifiers.
Musicals are allowed an odd level of self-awareness, compared to most creative mediums, just as TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram stories and reels about one’s life condense or recreate ‘candid’ or ‘oops’ opportunities.
We ignore that the poses have been rehearsed or probably recorded multiple times, or that the ultraviolet bedroom lighting had to be ordered on Amazon, because that one perfect sequence finally and momentarily makes it to our own screens. In musicals, the protagonist’s surroundings and fellows have to forfeit the fact that they are singing, for the that protagonist to best express themselves in song, for that one perfect note to be given its moment. And even those that don’t dance convey the extent of their emotion through moves. Secrets are blasted in falsetto and yet never heard by others in the musical.
It took me years to realise that the end number Breaking Free in HSM1 isn’t actually them performing in the musical, but is part of them auditioning for the musical, and I now sorely need to see what Twinkle Town Theatre: A Spring Musicale was actually like. HSM3 takes this musical about a musical thing further in the ‘I Want it All’ and prom sequences as the main cast are staging their future-selves as characters, so staging a musical within a musical. The third film ends with the song High School Musical which is so within itself and meta, it’s delicious.
Self-awareness and noticeable meta choices in musicals (Chad &Ryan’s offscreen clothes swap for example, functioning between the lines) or character-within-a-character behaviours, are best understood when we remember that characters are only created to serve a certain message. More specifically characters are only created out of the need to live out a certain metaphor that needs examining, so as a result their interior personality is hinged on that one dynamic. Sharpay for that reason is the most solid of all the HSM characters, she’s of single mind and purpose. When Sharpay spies her own reflection in the bathroom mirror, and startles herself with her own beauty, is ME.
Troy in contrast is of two-minds: loving basketball and the stage. His purpose is hinged on this dichotomy, his arc must work through this. He literally asks his father in HSM1, “You ever think maybe I could be both.” This ‘of two minds’ characterisation is a basic one most of us have seen before, though it’s not exactly, the same as ‘good and evil twinned-characters’, dopplegangers or ‘jeckyl-hyde’.
Milan Kundera in the Unbearable Lightness of Being explains that, “…characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about….The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.”
If the writing is good enough that investigation of one metaphor splits that character open to a lot of emotional nuance and complex in-betweenness. If the writing presents challenges to the character not just from their external environment but from within, it does wonders for the overall project.
Being ‘of two minds’ is a method of characterisation most potent in a short stories or superhero movies. It can be used as a device to contrast another anti-character’s desires, or can be attached to two contrasting opportunities in a story that pull at a character into parallel A and B plots; outcomes can come to a head or interweave; such as call back auditions being scheduled at the same time as the basketball championship game alongside Gabriella’s scholastic decathlon.
As elaborate as the external options presented to Troy were, throughout all of the movies, he doesn’t act in a way that further complicates what he wants in a way that is particularly ground-breaking or radical or cinematically attention-grabbing. Troy says conflicting things sure but only because he is constantly put in conflict; and if we’re being honest the stakes and dilemmas of the three films are somewhat manufactured and gain few plot accomplishments, even if they are ‘fun’.
The levels of realism do not easily rise to the surface in HSM, even as the clunky romance ‘love-triangle’ does.
His woes seem basic, because they don’t even feel like they are even his own woes — he never even signed up for Julliard in HSM3, or to work at the Lava Springs in HSM2, he didn’t ask to get scouted by local college hoopsters, he probably didn’t even have to work to be elected playmaker in HSM1. Throughout the franchise, he only serves as an approximation of how a standard hot jock character would act when offered options.
The all-star jock archetype in HSM still suffers from the affliction of having no agency, yet, despite having all the social power, he has no interior desires beyond those thrust in his face. Even Gabriella is chosen for him and I personally want to know who was manning the spotlight that forced troy and Gabriella to sing on stage together. Additionally, his best friend Chad was prescribed to him from kindergarten, for some longshot college basketball dream.
For the jock character, their foil is often their own epiphanies about how competition isn’t everything, but how satisfying can this trope be for the viewer if the jock characters have no interior desires and are beholden to their popularity and social standing? Troy’s own feelings don’t complicate his actions as much as we wish, because he’ll always be loyal to approval more than to rationalising his two mindedness on his own. As Sharpay says, “Troy this could change your life.”
He replies, “I’m more interested in what my friends think of me.”
HSM made the hot jock more sensitive, perceptive and charming, but he’s a master of none when trying to balance his life. Now did they have to write him this way? Did they have to present the message of popularity vs self-acceptance this way? Probably not. But if you allowed yourself to sing along even a little bit then you may possibly be more Gen-Z than a Millennial.
Silent Gen, Baby boomers, Gen X, Gen Y(Millennial), Gen Z. We’ve heard it all. We are individually determined by our age, this is true. Yet, somehow in more recent years, the impossible task of representing ourselves as individuals has been turned over to tick-box infographics, memes and hardly-objective think pieces. Generational cohorts give characteristics and deterministic powers to different groups of certain ages, while taking away the power of policymakers and institutional legislators, masking structural inequality, who are more culpable of dividing earning potential, dividing social mobility and determining quality of life than our age group, but go off I guess. To turn to Milan Kundera again, “What is unique about the “I” hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual “I” is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.”
Turning our age into a way of absolving structural inefficiency is not all that generational cohort labels do. Pew Research Centre explains that, ‘they can provide a way to understand how different formative experiences (such as world events and technological, economic and social shifts) interact with the life-cycle and aging process to shape people’s views of the world.’
They remind us that as individuals we are part of a collective who were all born into a time that they didn’t create. Characterised by history, we are like characters of modern history, born into a pre-existing arc. There are often times when I wonder about Troy pre-HSM1 — he was probably dating several cheerleaders, hazing freshmen and cheating on Taylor’s test-scores in class — the classic early 2000’s jock ‘lunkhead basketball man’ shenanigans.
In each HSM film however, Troy seems like he’s been body-swapped into this universe and surprised Sharpay is pursuing him or that his team expects so much of him, he laughs a little and reads the sheet music of his social role, like most teenagers, with very little in the way of written rule book available, that can tell him how to decide things for himself.
It seems that pre-Gabriella he was a completely different person and isn’t that a character we would have wanted to see? The film works so hard on showcasing this new pivot in Troy’s life that it is hard to imagine him being born into a narcissistic culture of most 2000s teen films that feature a star athlete, and so he sits uncomfortably on the unrealised possibility of those early 2000s jock archetypes. Of course, he too would eventually evolve into Lara Jean’s Peter or Booksmarts’s Nick, Juno’s Paulie Bleeker, The Duff’s Wesley or in Nate Daniel’s in Euphoria.
Every heart throb demands a social sacrifice, epiphany or an opportunity to learn something new in movies. Camille Paglia’s paper on Cults and Cosmic Consciousness, suggests that the roots of televised popular archetypes, including Troy Bolton, persistently associate themselves with Greco-Roman mythologies and popular Hellenistic traditions, perhaps less lunkhead basketball man and more Adonis or Antinuos: ‘androgynous young men, half sweet, half surly, who like Adonis or Antinous are…pretty, long-haired boys who mesmerize both sexes’. This was true of Troy’s friends and love interests, and in the real world too where after HSM2 was released, Gary Marsh told Variety at the time. “I think we have officially crossed the line from High School Musical the movie to High School Musical the mania.” The comparable phenomenon of being ‘the one’, fated to win, is a blueprint which went on to follow many other leading men in Disney Channel Original Movies.
Thinking about that paper and the balkanization of online communities that we have today, I can’t help but wonder how these very many subsets of the internet are comparable to cult phenomena of the 60’s, where gradations of social groups became very polarised. Online social fractionation, groupings, platforms, hyper-specific influencer communities and ‘tribes’ are somewhat symptoms of: ‘cultural fracturing in cosmopolitan periods of rapid expansion and mobility. Consisting of small groups of the disaffected or rootless, cults are sects that may or may not evolve into full religions. Perhaps cult phenomenon’s even at their most bizarre demonstrate, some of the sociological dynamics of the internet and the devoted pages and videos that make room for self-representation.
I asked my mother if she remembered the plot of the HSM films and she laughed, she did not really, she just said she knew there was a love story somewhere. HSM1, which in 2006 sold 3.7 million copies of its TV movie soundtrack, and was the top selling album of 2006 according to Nielsen Music was the first-ever TV movie soundtrack to hit №1 on the Billboard Top 200.
The entire movie is about him flustering out vague ideas of what his secret dreams could be, but somehow Troy’s desires are not strong or complex enough to foil the standard jock archetype, so in the end his secret dreams, appears obviously pre-chosen by everyone else around him. It’s like he’s not sure that if he had dreams, that he would know how to handle them. Control and indecisions and popularity follow in the wake of his swooshed hair and as Mekishana Pierre writes, ‘He is just a kid so used to having everyone adore him without too much effort that when they begin making demands on him and his time, he doesn’t know how to handle it.’
When I asked my own mother what she thought the main appeal of HSM was considering how global it became, she said, “One: the films were on Disney Channel. That’s where all the kids used to hang in them days because there wasn’t much of this Fortnite or this app that. So, Disney Channel was the hang out. And then I guess it had cross appeal in that their stars crossed ethnic divides, there was both sides represented, which is more reflective really of the youth in those days; in that the friendship groups that would hang out, was similar or identical to what was being presented on TV. I don’t remember you specifically hanging out with just black girls or just white girls, there was a mixture in your friendship group.”
Which I found interesting because it made me think of how colour-blindness in society and media peaks and troughs, as consciousness and culture resets following civil rights unrest. Over time thankfully people have continued to become aware that colour-blindness isn’t a solution to race and that one’s race has to be seen and recognised, and the life experiences attached to race have to be honoured.
If I had friends of different races when I was younger, I do admit colour-blindness had a lot to do with that, as a product of my age and the social consciousness at the time — especially as a member of the migrant community –but I know that if I have a friend of a different race now there is a lot more intentionality on my part on who I hang out with. Younger generations thankfully too are more aware of what each person has to gain or loose in a friendship emotionally, due to race, and as a consequence of living in a structurally classicist society. They have to trust to be seen in a way that’s not too different from who they are.
Maybe this is because there is now way more than just one secular platform available for this generation, than when I was younger. TV shows and films would provide secular spaces for representation, discussion and connection; and now there is the internet at younger fingertips and younger imaginations, there are greater possibilities of wilder representations, that don’t have to be greenlit by Disney. There are more fantasies to choose from.
My mother added, “And I guess the dialogue around race and what was happening then [circa 2006] is totally different from where we are now and the climate that’s contributed to your sister’s generations being so woke.” She laughs at that word, “And how intentional they are in choosing their friends.”
I replied, “Like obviously I wouldn’t hang out with everyone, because I knew they would be mean to me, and I knew that race was tied into them being mean. But I was more emotionally responsive than intellectually responsive to who I was friends with.”
The generation below me are luckily more open to criticizing and calling things out as they are, but naming everything doesn’t always help, over-anthologizing the emotions you go through doesn’t make it any easier to still be a teenager, just as over-simplifying high school in a musical doesn’t make it any easier to choose passions and curriculum successes that won’t leave you standing out from the crowd.
Obviously HSM was sweet sweet fantasy baby, just as much as an Instagram filter is, but isn’t this interesting? How much more one has to continue to stand out to determine who they want to be. How much of a story one has draw around themselves, or weave, edit and caption about oneself. High School Musical, for a time, was The Influence and so this is the story of High School Musical.
Favourite Songs: Breaking Free, What I’ve Been Looking For (Sharpay &Ryan’s version), When There Was Me and You, I Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You
Favourite Songs: You are the Music in Me, I Don’t Dance, Bet On It, Everyday.
Favourite Songs: Scream, obviously, A Night to Remember, High School Musical, sometimes Just Wanna Be With You
High School Musical was the seminal classic and benchmark for all future Disney Original Movies, and while I do wonder why the characters actively resist being in the school musical every year, It is an easily recognisable and memorable film, that follows a predictable narrative structure that we can only really say was predictable now. A girl and a boy somehow destined to meet (by the power of karaoke, naturally) face a society desperate to pry them apart for the sake of cultural binaries. Sporty. Geek. Theatre. None of the teenagers at East High are apathetically cool and each actively take part in perusing athletic success, skateboarding or flawless feather-boa choreographies as a means of identity and survival.
A time when we had it so good, but didn’t know it the whole time, a new level of vulnerability was offered on TV to represent my generation’s adolescent experiences.
High School Musical may be cycled in and out of phase of coolness online, and is relatable in the sense that it preaches similar themes of movies that came before it, like The Breakfast Club, where you don’t have to be just one thing.
It was first estimated that 170 million people tuned in to watch HSM1 on Disney Channel, a network known for cycling new original movies every few months. Online or TikTok trends, now move fast and with hyperintensity, in a way that also goes to show more than one idea of what is cool or what is cheugy. However, when we were kids the cycle of trends was slower to build, and so somehow mightier to crash or crush on. Popular culture staying power has considerably changed and compared to television’s reach, platforms like TikTok monthly reach 689 million users.
TikTok adoption is rising and the app had 60.9 Million Downloads in January 2021 alone, according to Sensortower. Currently 32.5% of U.S. Users are aged 10–19 and this base still very closely matches that of its predecessor Musical.ly. I asked my sister, who is 14 and uses TikTok, about how invested she was in the HSM movies, or how immersive they were, but her biggest take away was that the third film was kind of depressing, she remembers rehearsing the dance moves for the first film, but ultimately her personal DCOM obsession was 2013’s Teen Beach Movie. She’s at an age where she’s more likely to say ‘have you seen that meme’ than ‘did you watch that episode’, but then again we all are.
Technologies have expanded language and our nuanced understanding and appetite for critique, and evaluating art, when it is presented on mainstream channels. Social Media apps allow to us to reckon with the real and the imaginary. “We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under . . . The fourth category, the rarest, is the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.” — Milan Kundera.
Technology, in particular the rapid evolution of how people communicate and interact, is another generation-shaping consideration. Today’s youngest adults are in an “always on” technological environment. Perhaps, as more data is collected over the years, a clear, singular delineation will emerge, and maybe one of the markers on that line will include when Sing along dance along TV movies turned into Tiktok. Tiktok at least lets you ‘curate your own space’, while Disney Channel at the time didn’t have a lot for us to pick and choose from in terms of representation, and online content channels were limited to adobe flash games, Annoying Orange and Fred youtube videos.
Ultimately what HSM turned out to be was way better than the original draft of a Grease 3 thing where Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera play Rizo, Danny and Sandy’s children (yiikess). What Disney was able to make with Monique Coleman, Corbin Blue, Lucas Graebel, Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Tisdale was a much needed beautiful cultural reset, and that cast had the stardom to pull off an earnest musical and establish ringer baseball t-shirts as a late 2000s fashion staple (I also probably owned several beret headbands that Sharpay wears, yes, inclduing the gold one).
Seeing the cast go around the old Utah high school shooting location actually makes me want to cry, like tears streaming down my face, singing along to them singing along is like nostalgia rocket-fuel. A sure way to make you feel instantly young and at the same time lived through and rinsed with time is watching the three movies. Troy never did choose to resolve being of two minds by choosing to express himself in just one way. I hope the world was kind to him after graduation. I hope he created a vine account and got better at expressing himself.
Tropes are being given new chances to change each time another generation comes around, what we thought we needed gets better dressed and choreographed. You cannot choose which generation you emerge into, the traces of mythology running through the headlines or the ways people characterise others, but can only enjoy time while it remains, in 15 to 60s seconds it may be in the past. We never thought we’d get back our High School Musical when it ended, but now we can refresh and swipe down to live the story all over again.
I was born in 1997 and often experience the cut off of two of the most talked about generational cohorts. How best to know the divides of my age mates than through television and the internet. I tried my best to write this piece about the cultural border of High School Musical → The edge of Gen Y meeting the beginning of Gen-Z → the cultural border of Tiktok with an emotional approach, not necessarily an intellectual one. Also, nothing I’ve found has ever been able to explain to me why in the bonus track ‘I Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You’ — which works through Troy and Gabriella’s feelings for each other — Ryan and Sharpay are singing these sentiments to each other too? That song slaps though.
