By: Gabe Kleiber

Highland’s homecoming dance was a few Fridays ago, and one obvious challenge for any school dance is accommodating for the various age groups and genre preferences that come with having a school with hundreds of students.

But how well was this done?

To answer this question, I asked students what they liked and disliked about the song selection, and to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10.

One student said, “I really liked that they had some Spanish songs in there, but I wasn’t a huge fan of the rap ones.”

This brings up another huge issue for picking songs; the language barrier. Knowing and understanding the words to songs is often a big factor of whether or not you like them. There is no real option but to play songs in multiple languages, which they did, and it seemed to go over pretty well with everyone.

Another student said, “I liked that there was a variety of songs. My favorite was the dance pop songs, especially the classics like ‘I got a feeling’. I didn’t dislike many songs they played and they switched up the style a lot, so I will give it a 8/10.”

The last person I talked to said this, “I was expecting more slow music, but a lot of it was energetic and exciting. Even though they played a lot of music that I didn’t like, a lot of people seemed to enjoy every song they played. It wasn’t kids music either, it was the kind of music people our age actually listen too. I especially liked the hip hop ones like ‘Love Sosa’ and ‘Pop Out’. Overall they played something for everyone and did a nice job balancing different tastes. 7.5/10.”

I completely agree with this last one. It seems like overall there was a nice variety of music for all different genre preferences. Even if you aren’t a fan of pop music, they never played more than one or two without changing it up and playing something different. This made it so everything felt unique and everyone could dance to a song they liked often no matter what kind of music they liked.

They really did a good job with the balancing. I didn’t talk to anyone that didn’t enjoy at least 5 different songs they played, and there wasn’t a single song that any of them strongly disliked. Obviously, there were songs they were less fond of, but to keep everyone happy you have to play things that some people don’t like as much.

Overall, I am impressed they were able to keep so many people with different tastes happy, so I will give the playlist a 8.5/10.