For as long as many students at South have known, one of the defining traits of Fridays at school is the music playing in between each passing period. However, little do they know that there is a method behind the weekly music curation.
Melissa Law, the support secretary in the main office, revealed that picking the songs is a group effort among the people in the main office.
“We just kind of chat about it in the office between the four of us, and sometimes the assistant principals will kick in a few suggestions here and there” said Law. The song selection process begins during the middle of the week, and then all the songs are screened to ensure appropriate lyrics and content.
With the process of creating a curated playlist, the office comes up with a theme. When there are school events coming up, then sometimes the music will correlate to that event. When it’s an average week with nothing happening, Law explained that, “it can be related to the seasons or the month, I know for the first week of September, we played September by Earth, Wind and Fire. It can be related to weather, sporting events, and vacation. There’s always something going on.” In addition, she mentioned that some themes for the music revolved around words, such as survival during Breast Cancer Awareness month.
The Friday music began about 10 to 12 years ago. Assistant Professor Jay True explained that South was about to play against Bloomington North, and as a way to boost morale for the upcoming game, he got on the intercom and said, “The year is 1968. The Red Soxs won the World Series. The Colts won the Superbowl. IU is the in-state basketball champ. And Bloomington South was the number one rated team in high school football in Indiana. And the number one song of that year was… [Hey Jude by the Beatles].”
He proceeded to pay homage during the passing periods in the respective five years Bloomington South had been the number one team, along with different winners of sports tournaments and playing the most popular song of that year. In response to the passing period announcements, True said, “The teachers loved it and the kids loved it, so we said maybe this is something…We kept playing the music, we didn’t do the special thing. It was a way to psyche up the football team by showing them, ‘hey we were the sports champions in 1968, undefeated,’ and it just took off.”
As of lately, there have been issues with the music quality on Friday. “It’s okay, like I don’t kid it. But it can be a bit annoying, espescially with the bad sound quality lately,” said sophomore Sukhmani Gill.
The usual speaker system involved using a jack chord to connect to an iPad. “For the last four weeks, it has been working intermittently. It’s really frustrating,” said Law. She further elaborated that when the issue occurred, they would just play the music from the iPad and place it next to the speaker. But this issue has been resolved as Brad Harrison, the computer technician, came in and fixed the chord connecting to the speaker. While the music quality may have declined briefly, expect a comeback.
