PUSSYCAT DOLLS - "Don't Cha"

(#1018. 17th September 2005)

If “DARE” at No.1 felt like a lairy fluke, “Don’t Cha” feels coldly predestined, a branding project whose success was engineered by all the machineries at Hollywood and the industry’s command. Look more closely though and there are similarities too - the Pussycat Dolls, like Gorillaz, have their roots in the mid-90s; Interscope and The Viper Room, Johnny Depp and Jimmy Iovine, and the brief post-grunge swing revival which feels like a distant transatlantic cousin of Britpop’s suited-and-booted embrace of retro style.

The earliest footage I can find of the Pussycat Dolls dates from 1995, shortly after their formation as the intro entertainment at Depp’s Viper Room club, whose rep had been horribly (but enticingly) sealed by the death of River Phoenix there two years before. The Dolls were a burlesque troupe, dancing to the genre classics. They were part of a growing revival in the art of burlesque, a dressed-up response to a casual culture, but marinated in 90s knowingness. The Hollywood twist in founder Robin Antin’s brand was that rising stars might be up on stage performing with the Dolls - Christina Applegate and Carmen Electra both had a stint in the troupe.

The Dolls’ music career is just one part of Antin’s committed, successful management of the brand - she’s steered her business into Vegas residencies, restaurants and clothing lines. This idea of pop stars as pan-cultural presences is hardly new - just ask anyone who watched the Monkees or bought a Beatles Wig - and the Dolls are different only in that the music came as a later part of Antin’s overall project. It was a way to take the brand off the stage and into a far vaster realm of media and name recognition. 

And the time for it was clearly right. Burlesque - the art of the tease, the tempting mix of sex and storyline - was the lingua franca of pop video in the early 00s in a way it hadn’t been in 1995. Antin offered the job of translating the Dolls into pop to Jimmy Iovine. The question confronting him was broadly the same one Damon Albarn was pondering when he conceived Gorillaz. What does fiction sound like?

From a pop perspective, Iovine had an obvious answer. There had been one supremely successful girl group in the last few years; one band who combined sex, storytelling, stardom and cutting-edge pop. It was inevitable the Pussycat Dolls (Music Edition) would take Destiny’s Child as a template. When that band announced their retirement on stage a few months before “Don’t Cha”, it made the timing even better.

But the pop perspective leaves something out; the history of the Dolls up to that stage, as a neo-Burlesque troupe dancing to classic burlesque tracks like “Big Spender”. In the two years between Antin giving Iovine a call and “Don’t Cha”’s glide to success the producer reshaped the troupe gradually. It’s a kind of chrysalis era for the group in which we see a suggestion of a different direction and a smoother transition from burlesque act to R&B girl band. Their first single, for the soundtrack of 2004’s Shall We Dance?, was a version of Dean Martin standard “Sway”. It’s a song much closer to their Vegas roots and the video features a lot of dance-era Dolls who wouldn’t make the final cut for the band.

“Sway” is a tantalising suggestion of a more electro-swing direction the group could have gone in, one which was truer to the troupe’s history. It would have avoided the sense “Don’t Cha” definitely carries, that these women were R&B bandwagon-jumpers, suddenly arriving in the charts fully-formed and adding little to their chosen genre. The only problem with that is that “Sway” is also an unconvincing mess, a production that badly wants to update 50s bolero into something sleazier and sleeker but doesn’t have much of a clue how to do it. It’s no way to launch a career, as the public’s non-reaction proves.

“Don’t Cha”, on the other hand, is a sure thing, a song with the kind of meme-ready hook that sinks in (like it or not) on a single listen. It was offered to the Sugababes, maybe because the slightly aloof demeanor of the verses would have worked for them, maybe just because they’d had a big song about being freaky. I’m glad in a way they turned it down: for all “Don’t Cha”’s slickness, there’s something more conventional about it than the wave of R&B and girl-group pop it followed on from. Destiny’s Child singles are songs of independence, fury, sexual assertiveness, and at times a crude will to power. “Don’t Cha” is about seduction, and brushing aside an unseen rival. Men might affect to deplore it, but they wouldn’t be threatened by it.

That doesn’t make it bad; in most ways it’s a fine pop record, a commanding deployment of a genre whose recent peaks almost nobody could have lived up to. Antin and Iovine had the immense luck to find singer Nicole Scherzinger, whose theatrical performance is the spark of personality “Don’t Cha” needs to smoulder. She may not have been part of the burlesque troupe but she treats the song’s verses as a routine, each smokily winding line making the claims of heat on the chorus feel a little more earned. 

Where “Sway” was overripe, “Don’t Cha” strips the idea of a burlesque R&B band back to its core, a rhythmic bump and shimmy. It’s a backing that puts a lot of trust in its performer to make it compelling, and Scherzinger repays that. What she can’t do - and this is what will bite the band down the line - is make it sound like a group.

7 out of 10