Various Artists
Josie and the Pussycats - Music From the Motion Picture (Play-Tone/Epic/Sony Music Soundtrax)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2002

The idea was incredibly simple, what folks in Hollywood call "high concept": girl band goes on adventures and solves mysteries between gigs. Josie and the Pussycats the movie, albeit compulsively watchable, so patently wastes the opportunities laid out in front of it that, get this, the writer-directors (also responsible for the smugly self-congratulatory Can't Hardly Wait ) don't even use the source material given to them. The pointless plot has our bewhiskered heroines combating tastemakers, or the perils of fame, or Target, or something else stupid and wholly removed from the fundamental nature of the cartoon that had some of us absolutely transfixed at the tender age of 3. All this plus an Alexandra who is still a bitch (yay!) but is now utterly repulsive and unappealing (boo!). Thus, what should've been a gold mine instead sold out its prepackaged audience and failed to attract the expected new one. Can this project be saved?

The answer to that question hinges on the soundtrack album, which stands up tall to declare, "Um, did we mention that we have Rachel Leigh Cook decked out in a spangly leotard and kitten ears?" (Answer: oh my, yes, duly noted and credit given.) Having distracted us thusly, the CD, in its way as trashily addictive as the movie, attempts a salvage job, another matter entirely. The soundtrack, like the movie, is too eager for the most part to frolic around in an attitude that it has no affinity for, often using material it hasn't earned and clearly doesn't understand. That's evident by the cover versions of familiar songs, which generally miss the point entirely. "Money" kicks off with the mindbogglingly misguided declaration, "This is for all you shoppers out there," which transforms a song about miserly greed into a manifesto for conspicuous consumption (possibly appropriate in a year in which it was decreed to be our patriotic duty to go out and spend like we've never spent before), delivering the exact opposite of the song's intent in the process. More sacrilegious than even that, the "Josie" theme song has been changed. Changed! That may, however, have been inevitable, since the initial inspiration was gutted from the get-go, making the old lyrics irrelevant; the new words play like a failed girl-power anthem. "Real Wild Child" manages to be merely inept, which is oddly comforting, considering.

Josie's original songs, on the other hand, operate as textbook examples of the pitfalls of creation by committee. With too many songwriters bouncing off of one another, there's no sure sense of direction or drive; once the sixth or seventh writer climbs aboard a single song ("You Don't See Me" lists 9 of them, while 10 people supposedly worked on "Come On"), it's time to wipe the board clean and start over. When not overburdened by a surfeit of composers, the songs just plain miss the mark more often than not. "Three Small Words" is a come-on disguised (poorly) as a kiss-off, not to mention "All The Small Things" disguised (poorly) as "Wannabe" and therefore a fourth-rate "Search and Destroy" ripoff. "You're A Star" sparks but never catches fire, the result of having a beginning and a middle but no ending. The two DuJour songs demonstrate the clearest consistency and character, although they're far from smartly done parodies of boy-band pop. Whatever it is that you could imagine doing with "Backdoor Lover" (about exactly what you think it's about) is far cleverer than what's actually done, I assure you. Both cuts are annoying and you'll never want to hear them again, making them, ironically, worse than what they're parodying.

Perhaps recognizing the above, the personnel who are actually heard on the album remain mostly anonymous. There are cross-label shout-outs to Bif Naked and Matthew Sweet (really? Matthew?) with no indication as to why (maybe that was a part of the agreement). As for the vocals, well, it seems to me that the obvious Josie would have been Juliana Hatfield (who, in fact, has already provided a superlative, not to mention faithful, version of the cartoon's theme song on 1995's Saturday Morning Cartoons' Greatest Hits ), but I'm guessing that the folks behind the project wanted somebody far more anonymous. And hey, they plugged in former Letters To Cleo mewler Kay Hanley; good job. The problem is that what works wonders for the bratty punk manifestos leaves a black hole during the more plaintive moments, which pretty much consists of the not-quite-moving "You Don't See Me."

Really, after giving the consolation prize to Anna Waronker (for providing the riff in "I Wish You Well" and what I suspect is the keenness of "You're A Star"), the only contributor who unequivocally comes out smelling like a rose is Adam Schlesinger, clearly on a hot streak these days. Producing the lion's share of the songs, he's more attuned to the sensibility of blaring guitar pop than Babyface, who takes the first five. As a writer, meanwhile, he delivers the only unqualified gem in the batch; so obviously was "Pretend To Be Nice" the best song in the movie that, knowing that he wrote exactly one song all by his lonesome, I pegged it as his immediately. The part where Josie's lax beau "falls asleep on the living room couch/With his sunglasses on and his tongue hanging out" creates a more vivid, and truer, and funnier, mental image than anything the movie itself can be bothered with. When the dust settles (or when the fur stops flying, to use the feline metaphors that they're practically begging us to make), Josie the soundtrack is just like Josie the movie: a moment of brilliance stranded in the middle of a vast ocean of acceptable mediocrity, with a few islands of sheer crap thrown in. In both cases, I'm astonished at how clearly not-good the results are, but I'm occasionally compelled to dive in yet again to see just what went wrong. What a waste.

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