True High School Popularity

The music video "Popular Song"  by MIKA and Ariana Grande displays a stereotype of popular high schoolers. The video shows that popularity is only for "cool" kids, who party and make fun of nerds. For example, Ariana and MIKA portray "unpopular" kids and are always carrying books around while the "populars" carry nothing. This demonstrates that in order to be popular, you have to be dumb and not care about school. However, if you were to walk around any high school in America, you would see every kid carrying a book or wearing a backpack, demonstrating that popularity has nothing to do with caring about school work. In fact, the most popular kids in most high schools are some of the smartest kids in the school. These kids actually care about their school work and they don't care if others see them carrying books or even studying.

Another example of the stereotype is in the lyrics of the song. At one point the artists say "standing on the field with your pretty pom poms...", saying that the popular girl in high school is a cheerleader. Not only does. the song say that being a cheerleader makes someone popular, but it also says that the cheerleader has to be pretty and mean. This isn't always true. It's evident that in most social situations, popularity is based mainly on social skills. The more social a person is and the more people they talk with, the more popular they are.

Finally, the most obvious stereotype in this video is the dumb jock. At one point in the video, the dumb jock dunks the head of an "unpopular" kid in the toilet. That is the oldest idea of bullying, however it isn't always the way it happens. In fact, bullies tend to use more subtle tactics like isolation and cruel teasing resorting to physical tactics only when they have to.

Popularity is not based on whether or not you care about school, how you look, or the sports you play. These stereotypes are false and don't represent the true reality of popularity in high school. Videos like "Popular Song"  enforce the stereotype that popularity is based on the old ideas of what makes people popular like being pretty or being a dumb jock when in reality, it's the positive characteristics in people we're drawn to. It's not interesting when a video continues to show the same old stereotypes. Maybe the "Popular Song" would be an even more popular video if it depicted kids in a real high school.