The Andover Song - Phillips Academy, Massachusetts

I recently discovered a song and music video that was made by the graduating class of a notable high school called Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.  The song is an electronic/pop/rap song much like what is popular on the radio these days.  It was written and directed by a student named Michael Kontaxis.  The instrumental was made by fellow student Charlie Danner.



So what is special about this song?  Well first off, it is over 7 an a half minutes long.  It contains verses from several different students as well as teachers.  This means they had to organize this project to get all these people to record their verses, then put them together to make the complete song.  Not only that, they then also recorded an entire music video with all the participants on campus.  Anyone who has made a collaboration song or video like this knows how difficult it is to put together everything and make it work.

The song is very catchy and sounds like anything you would hear on the pop radio.  The rapping is better than expected given the fact that it is done by regular high school students and teachers.  Overall the song is very good, but it is not perfect.

The Youtube video has ratings and comments blocked.  This is probably because they receive a lot of negative comments and ratings.  Knowing the internet culture, this is expected.  When some kids from a prestigious high school make a rap song and put it on the internet, it is just asking for the haters to go to town on it.  This is a shame, because the song and video are very well done and should be applauded, not hated on. 

The song is a bit long at 7:54.  Most people don't have the attention span to listen to a pop song like this for that length of time.  They probably would have been better off trimming out some of the verses and choruses to get it down to around 4 minutes.  Some of the students and teachers have 2 verses each so this was definitely possible.

The song has some minor audio clipping, and some of this kids it seems tried too hard to be cool or tough which kind of makes it cheesy, but overall this graduating class did an excellent job on this project.  I'm sure it will go down in history as the theme song for the school.  Michael Kontaxis who headed this project has a bright future.  If he was able to put this together expect big things from him in the future.