The Pussycat Dolls PCD: Don’t Cha Wish All Pop Music was Hot Like This?
Take 5 virtual unknowns, and one possible girl-group alumnus (Nicole Scherzinger – 1/5 of short-lived Eden’s Crush (another manufactured girl-group courtesy of the WB)), mix with a microphone and a dozen songs laced by the most in-demand producers, combine with tank tops and booty-shorts, add equal parts erotic choreography and voila! You have yourself a bonafide girl group. Seems too easy, right? Not if you’re the Pussycat Dolls.
The brainchild of an ex-Broadway producer, The Dolls started off as nothing but a cabaret revue in clubs around Las Vegas. Once they attracted the attention of the mainstream, they started to become frequented by high-profile female celebrities who wanted to participate in the routine (Carmen Electra, Pink, Christina Aguilera, Eva Longoria, etc.). This led to the group incorporating more cover-songs into their sets and eventually gaining live performances on high-profile TV events. Less than a year later, they have a top-10 smash single and album on their hands, so eloquently titled PCD.
While it’s hard to not take these ladies as anything more than a joke, it’s also hard to deny just how infectiously catchy and well-constructed their music is. While they try to put emphasis on the lyrics by talking about “real, gritty” subjects and on Nicole’s sturdy soprano by making the melodies and arrangements a bit more expansive and complex, the truth of the matter is that this album is all about the beats and each producer who put their signature stamp on this record passed with flying colors.
Cee-Lo takes his chameleonic personality and strips it down to guttural drum kicks, a seductive bassline, and smart-timed horns that’s prime for the girls to strut their sexual prowess over on lead single, Don’t Cha. Like a fierce cougar on the prowl, Nicole commands the record with such an understated tenacity that makes one wonder exactly what purpose the other 5 Dolls serve. Will.I.Am. takes his own guilty-pleasure romp, “My Humps”, and turns it inside out to a much better effect on the comical Beep.
With an unforgettable hookline, and catchy banter between Will and Nicole on the hook, this is another guilty pleasure sure to last long and die hard on the charts and our memory banks. And Timbaland takes his stutter-step go-go jive on a roller coaster ride with the fierce and frantic Wait A Minute and easily blows the two previous records down a rung or two.
And just when your heart is about to collapse on the dancefloor, the Dolls interject for 3:27 withâÂ?¦.a ballad?!? Just when you had your hopes up that this would be an straight and unabashed dance-pop record full of flirtatious hooks and dirty grooves, the Dolls have to take a breather to tell just how head-over-heels they are for this certain someone on Stickwitu. And while there’s nothing wrong with being in love and all that junk (and while the song is pretty good as far as cheesy love songs go), when I’m shaking my *ss on the dancefloor, the last thing I want to think about is being in love.
But then again, I guess “Stickwitu” could be viewed as just a moment for us to catch our breath before PCD proceeds to make our heart wanna beat straight thru our chest with the high-watermark point of the album; Buttons. Sean Garrett easily wins the battle of the beats on the album as his insane Indian groove pulsates and gyrates thru the speakers with such a reckless abandon that it will have a paraplegic on the floor break dancing! Not to mention Nicole gives her best vocal performance here on the album; sounding like an agitated sex-kitten in heat, her aggressive snarl just heightens the tension of the record and makes for the album’s most undeniable moment.
From there on out, the rest of the album kinda coasts on the average-to-above-average plane, with just a little bit of turbulence along the way. Rich Harrison spices up with signature go-go drums with a retro bassline and strings on the funky, disco romp that is I Don’t Need A Man. And the Dolls try their hand at electro-rotic-techno-thump, with good results, on their take of the Donna Summer staple Hot Stuff (I Want You Back). Then Diane Warren drops a line with the mid-tempo, supposed-to-be-serious How Many Times, How Many Lies and creates a record that sounds about as out-of-place as a Diane Warren record can on a dance-pop record.
Kwame thankfully dirties the groove back up with the jackhammer drums and horn blares on Bite The Dust.; Nicole turning in another tense and aggressive vocal that suits the record just right. Then the girls veer off-road again with their jazzy interpretation of Herbie Mann’s Right Now. While the drums and horns really heighten the staccato jazzy vibe, the cheap acoustics and tin-pan accompanying instruments turns this into nothing but a Disney-esque interlude.
They get halfway back on-track with a smoldering cover of Soft Cell’s Tainted Love that just drips of sexiness but mistakenly splice it with their karaoke rendition of the Supremes’ staple Where Did Our Love Go that just negates virtually all of the sexiness “Tainted” possessed. And the whole affair ends on a kinda ho-hum note with the jazzy but bland Feelin’ Good. Harkening back to their cabaret roots, the jazzy production sizzles and smolders in all the right places, and Nicole’s seductive vocal performance accents the song quite nicely. But nothing about the record really pops and leaves the listener a tad unfulfilled at the record’s end.
Although the Pussycat Dolls are probably the most unnecessary girl-group ever created in the history of pop music, that still doesn’t negate the fact that they have some of the best manufactured dance-pop you’ll probably ever hear. The lyrics catch your ear and tickle your brain cells in all the right places, Nicole’s vocals seduce and tantalize at all the right times, and the production is as radical and charismatic as pop music can get (for right now).
And while they probably won’t be remembered 3-5 years from now, and their songs will be probably be done better by a more credible girl group 6 months-to-a-year from now, that doesn’t mean you can’t sit back and simply enjoy the music for what is; (mostly) unapologetic dance-pop that’ll rock you from your eyelashes to your toenails.
True, they’re as gimmicky a group as you can get. But everybody falls for a gimmick once in a while, right?
Right?
