Eugene Levy and Jason Biggs in 'American Pie 2'
The 15 songs by 15 bands on this album offhandedly mix genres that until recently were oil and water: pop, punk, rap and heavy metal. This practice has become as de rigeur as nipple rings for bands over the last couple years, but it's easy to forget how alien it was to audiences of the recent past. Throughout the bulk of the '90s, the perceived incompatibility of these genres was more than musical; it was subcultural. The cheerleader listened to pop, the wannabe-street kid listened to rap, the aspiring Sundance auteur with the sideways haircut listened to punk. When the genres did mix, like on the soundtrack for the forgettable 1993 thriller Judgment Night, it was with breathless pomp and circumstance (News flash: Pearl Jam rockin' and Cypress Hill rappin' on the same track! Very likely kicking back and sharing a doobie!). Now, not only is there nothing remarkable about a band that stirs rock, rap and pop into the same song; the kids, if the movies are to be believed, no longer carve themselves up into rappers, rockers and teenyboppers to the way they used to. Rather, they all appear to be a little of each. To those who grew up in the age of Michael J. Fox and Doc Martens, watching the relatively harmonious party scenes in the "American Pies" can be like walking in on Sharon and Arafat sharing a bubble bath.
Look at the teen flicks of the '80s. In their vision of high school, "crowd" is everything. In 1983's "Valley Girl," Nicolas Cage plays a semi-mohawked Hollywood surf-punk with a crush on the suburban aristocrat of the title. When he sings along to a new wave tune on the radio, her cheerleaderish friend reacts as is he's reciting from "Mein Kampf." When he and his buddy decide to sneak into a party at her house where jocks in polo shirts cavort to bubbly synth pop, it's not social awkwardness they're worried about; should things go awry, the audience is led to believe, they may be pummeled within an inch of their lives. "Crowd" is also crucial in "The Breakfast Club" (1985), in which teenagers from five different social strata thrown together in detention spend a whole movie figuring out how to get along, "Can't Buy Me Love" (1987), in which a dork bribes a popular girl into pretending to date him, "Some Kind of Wonderful" (1987), in which Eric Stoltz must choose between a little drummer grrrl and a jockette, and countless others ("Pretty in Pink," "Better off Dead," "Lucas," "Heathers.") As late as 1995, in "Clueless," crowd is still important. The regally popular main character, Cher, introduces a new girl to her Beverly Hills high school by pointing out each of the crowds lounging in their respective portions of the schoolyard, sequestered in their hate, as W.H. Auden once wrote of Europe's warring nations.
By contrast, the "American Pies" are about a group of buddies, and said buddies are essentially crowdless. Finch is a scrawny proto-intellectual who wears black Converse sneakers (timeless badge of the high school rebel) and speaks as if he wants to be Jeremy Irons when he grows up. Chris Kleins lacrosse player, "Oz" Ostreicher, not only doesn't want to beat Finch up; he actually appears to like Finch and regard him as a bro. The other dudes are middle-of-the-road types who don't seem particularly interested in sports other than dessert-humping but who show up at the game to cheer on Klein. The only exception is Stifler, who shuts the band geeks out of his party, but who in turn is only tolerated because he has a house to party in and a mom of easy leisure. His jock exclusionism is part and parcel of his pitiable attempt to be a macho man.
The crowds have lost their power in other movies of the past two years as well. In "Bring it On," Kirsten Dunst's suburban SoCal cheerleader, Torrance, thinks nothing of flirting with a punk who just moved to town from L.A. When he becomes her boyfriend, his punkness and her cheerleaderness are hardly a source of drama at all, while in "Valley Girl," the punk and the popular girl might as well have been Hatfield and McCoy. In "Sugar and Spice," a tight-knit band of cheerleaders consists of a perky prom queen type, a trash-talking convict's daughter, a goodie-two-shoes fundamentalist Christian, and a nerd who gets into Harvard. If they were characters in a movie made ten years ago, they wouldn't be able to remain two minutes in the same locker room without bloodshed.
It only makes sense that the songs these creatures hear in the background should be mutts genre-wise, open to all influences. If high schools no longer house crowds that wish to represent themselves with musical genres, why maintain any generic integrity?
That's fine. But don't forget about writing good songs while you're busy making sure every genre feels included in the conversation. From Blink-182's "Every Time I Look at You" to Sum 41's "Fat Lip" to Jettingham's "Cheating" the mode is uptempo, plaintive but not gloomy, a little angry but good-humored. For all that blending of rap and metal and punk, they're still craftsmanlike pop songs, peppy, hook-centered, reasonably entertaining. None of them are insufferable, but the only one that totally kicks ass is American Hi-Fi's "Vertigo," which happens to be the lone slab of undiluted Cheap Trick-era rawk. It doesn't extend an olive branch to hip-hop fans with a DJ scratch, or to metal fans with a jackhammer riff , and who cares? You can dance to it or make out to it or, I suspect, execute cheerleading moves to it. It's encouraging that movies like the "American Pies" seem to believe teenagers can all just get along these days. I suspect the movies are at least partially right, because they re ridiculously popular with teenage demographics — but it will be a shame if a band feels it has to pack their songs with every style in the Grove Dictionary of Music to be au courant.