Recently when I was hosting trivia, the audio clue was the guitar solo to this song:
Everybody got it. They knew “Stacy’s Mom” when they heard it. Just the guitar solo, even. One dude who wasn’t even playing came up to quietly, his mouth covered with his hand, tell me the name of the song and the band. I hate that song, and I hate that video. Both of them are, to use one of the terms of art I’ve gleaned from a life of culture writing, dumb bullshit.
Of course, fans of Fountains of Wayne will note, accurately, that “Stacy’s Mom” is anomalous, to some degree, within the confines of the band’s output. This is true. They worked within the palatable-to-the-music-heads pop sub-genres of “power” and “punk” and “indie.” “Stacy’s Mom” is robust power pop, but it’s also inane blather. It’s not clever enough to be fun, not winking enough to accept. Nevertheless, it’s the song that broke through, because it’s a dumb song about being young and horny and wanting to fuck your friend’s mom. Then in the music video there’s Rachel Hunter in a weird-cut bikini. Other than American Pie, it is the pinnacle of “MILF” content, which I hate to my core. In that Faustian bargain way, Fountains of Wayne had a moment in the Sun and contributed to the zeitgeist. It just happened to be for the worst thing they ever crafted.
Adam Schlesinger wrote “Stacy’s Mom” along with the band’s frontman Chris Collingwood. Through the process of the world’s unfeeling twists and turns, Schlesinger became notable as one of the first, maybe the first, celebrity death associated with complications from a little something called the Novel Coronavirus. COVID-19 cut down Schlesinger at the age of 52. Tom Hanks getting COVID was the “Oh shit, this is real!” moment for many, but Tom Hanks is alive today at 68. Schlesinger will never see that age. Fucking years from now somebody might say on whatever social media exists that “Adam Schelsinger would have been 68 years old today.” Except they won’t, because apparently he was born on Halloween, and Gen Z fucks will still be too busy talking about “spooky season” for some D-list celebrity pop-punk impresario to break through and be remembered.
Personally, I remember Schlesinger more fondly for his contributions to the Josie & the Pussycats soundtrack. I enjoy that film a ton. It’s so perfectly silly but still fairly astute and clever, sweet and acerbic in equal measure. Plus, it’s about a band fronted by Rachael Leigh Cook. At this point, Josie & the Pussycats doesn’t need me stumping for it. When I was grabbing that introductory photo, I saw a litany of, “Actually guys, Josie & the Pussycats is good!” articles on the internet. There’s a good chance I have one or two out there.
Schlesinger produced about half the songs on the movie’s soundtrack, but he really only crafted one song himself, though he has solo credit on it. That would be “Pretend to Be Nice,” second on the track listing, and an early foray into the band’s music in the movie.
It sounds oh-so-vociferously power-poppy, but lyrically it finds itself in that turn-of-the-millennium pop-punk and emo wheelhouse. This would be third-wave emo, which my friend Matt (I don’t know if he’s a reader of my Substack, but if he is, hey Matt!) actually assessed is effectively just pop-punk in different packaging. I called the third wave “melodramatic and poppy” in the same email thread. Yes, we were emailing each other about how we would describe the five waves of emo, because we fucking rule. Anyway, first-wave emo is the best, because it’s just about ripping:
”Pretend to Be Nice” is Josie’s ode to crushing on somebody who is kind of shitty to you and thinking, well, if you could just pretend to be nice then I could have a fascimile of what I want and that’s enough for me. In real life, this is a less-than-ideal vision to have for your interpersonal, quasi-romantic relationships. Josie is a fictional person, though, and also she is young. It totally tracks she would write a song like “Pretend to Be Nice.” It is a spot-on reflection of where pop-punk was at the time.
Schlesinger took something from the world and he synthesized it into a palatable package. Josie & the Pussycats was a flop, but nobody blamed the soundtrack. People dig it now. It’s so very cult classic. He did this before he constructed “Stacy’s Mom” alongside Collingwood, as Josie is a 2001 film and that song came out in 2003. Although, apparently Collingwood and Schlesinger had a Lennon-McCartney thing going on where they were always credited together, but Schlesinger is credited existentially with being the driving force behind “Stacy’s Mom.” That doesn’t surprise me. He synthesized something in the air into a song, and god damn, it was a hit. I may hate the song, but Schlesinger had a touch.
Of course, there is another bit of pop culture that Schlesinger wrote and produced:
I love Josie & the Pussycats. I like That Thing You Do!. I hate “Stacy’s Mom.” I recognize something akin to tragedy in the death of a man at the age of 52 at the hands of an uncompromising and rampant virus that changed the landscape of the fucking world. “Pretend to Be Nice” threads the needle of feeling like a song reasonably from a fictional band and also functionally working as a song you don’t mind hearing. It’s an unusual skill. Schlesinger had it. The world no longer has access to it. Rachel Hunter was in her mid-thirties in that music video. That kind of feels like bullshit.