can't you see that i'm the one?
"3 small words" by josie and the pussycats & a music documentary
For one week sometime before 9/11 — we don’t even know what week it was — Josie and the Pussycats was the hottest band in the world.
Do you remember this? After the tragic accident that ended boy band DuJour’s lives (and more importantly, their careers), Josie and the Pussycats burst onto the scene as the most jerkin’ band of the early 2000s. They put out single after single, had multiple brand partnerships, performed an epic concert, and then they just . . . disappeared.
For decades now it’s been rumored that a documentary exists featuring exclusive behind-the-scenes footage and the full story of Josie and the Pussycats’ meteoric rise. Frankly, I never believed it. I’m not a big tinfoil hat person, but that would’ve had the potential to be THE music documentary of the 21st century and you’re telling me they just, what, suppressed it? Forced it underground? What could they possibly have to hide? How fucking good this band was? We already knew that!
But, friends. The documentary not only EXISTS, but I have FOUND IT and WATCHED it and you’re not even READY for the revelations!! DuJour’s tragic accident may not have been an accident! DuJour might be alive! If Josie and the Pussycats’ overnight success seemed too good to be true, uh, it kind of was! There’s a REASON why I’m still saying “jerkin’” even all these years later and it is going to blow your mind!!!
If you’re receiving this newsletter in your inbox, please, print it out! Take screenshots! Forward the link to a friend! We can’t let this shocking true story get buried again. It’s too important to music history — nay, music herstory.
The documentary opens with footage of fans screaming for DuJour, one girl excited to maybe touch them — she doesn’t care which one, or where — and a male fan who loves them, you know, like brothers. They launch into their mega-hit “Backdoor Lover” complete with its iconic choreography (remember when some people were trying to say this song was about something other than a boyfriend entering through the literal back door to his girlfriend’s house?! just because they mimed spanking each other’s asses in a dance move?!? lol 2000s tabloid culture was out of control).
I’ve seen clips of this interview before — the way they break into a little four-part harmony, charmingly off-pitch and missing three of the harmonies — but the first brand-new footage comes when we see them on their Target-branded plane with their manager, Wyatt. Marco is busy pointing out that the DuJour-branded Coke can shows him with a goatee even after he shaved it to a soul patch for the “Don’t Tell Ya Papa” video which YES I’ve been saying that!!! This was so validating just to hear that DuJour was as on top of these little details as I always hoped they would be. *NSYNC and Backstreet Boys were cool, don’t get me wrong, but DuJour were true artists.
There was tension within the band, though. D.J. is upset that Marco’s monkey has been pooing on his stuff; Travis is upset that Marco has been doing “his” face from the “Whut?” video. I do have to admit that I’d completely forgotten that Travis originated the little pursed lips/fingers pointing face! I totally thought that was Marco’s thing. Travis was my favorite DuJour member even though I know there were all those Casper/Chuckie memes about how pale he is, his red hair, etc., but idk. He just always seemed so intense to me. He also sings the lyin’ on your bed starin’ up at the moon lyric in “Backdoor Lover,” which is my favorite part. D.J. has the smooth moves; Travis has the smolder; Les is the sensitive one; Travis is kinda the underdog. Like now, after the argument about his face, Travis is still hiccuping from all his pent-up emotion. My man!
Then we get to the first mysterious part of this documentary. Les points out to the band’s manager that they heard a weird background track when they were listening to DuJour’s latest single. Wyatt gives the song a listen on headphones and says he has no idea where that track might’ve come from, and the next thing you know, he and the pilot are parachuting out of the plane?!! DuJour’s plane nosedives toward the ground with the four members of the band still arguing about Travis’ “face” and Les repeating mantras like “DuJour means seatbelts” and “DuJour means crash positions.”
Meanwhile, Wyatt has landed in Riverdale — a town located somewhere between Greendale and Midvale, a town we know as being famous as the birthplace of Josie and the Pussycats. So when Wyatt says, “Looks like we need to find a new band,” we know it must be a matter of time.
The documentary really kicks off once “3 Small Words” starts over footage of Josie and the Pussycats jamming and hanging out. I love this song! I love these girls! I’m a punk rock prom queen/brown paper magazine . . . I feel like Josie and the Pussycats gave a generation of girls the permission to be both feminine AND punk rock, like has Avril Lavigne paid this debt yet!?! Has she acknowledged her ancestors??? “3 Small Words” (2001) walked so “Complicated” (2002) could run.
The lyrics to this song are so clever and edgy, too. it took SIX whole hours and FIVE long days FO(U)R all your lies to come undone/and those THREE small words were way T(W)OO late/’cause you can’t see that I’m the ONE. And I mean, I’m a ten ticket thrill ride/Don’t you want to come inside?, I see what you’re doing, Josie, this was quite provocative to high school me lol.
The music video cut of the song reaches its end and we see that they’re just . . . playing in the middle of a bowling alley. I remember reading about this as part of Josie and the Pussycats’ origin story, so it was cool to actually get to see it — did you know they used to only make like $5 per show after you took out the rental fees for their bowling shoes? When the band is confronted by a group of giggling DuJour fans all dressed in pink merch, Melody (the band’s drummer) says that her leopard ear headband isn’t stupid it’s special and the girls say, yeah, special ed! which is one of those early 2000s insults I hope won’t ever be brought back, along with low-rise jeans.
This exclusive footage also confirms what I’ve always suspected, which is that Valerie (the band’s bassist) is the true glue that keeps Josie and the Pussycats together. “Who’s a rock star?” she says to Josie to cheer her up after the DuJour fan encounter, and it works! Josie’s a rock star!
“Come On” plays over a shot of Josie practicing guitar in front of a full-length mirror, mussing up her hair to look more punk, putting sunglasses on. I always thought this was one of their most underrated songs. I don’t want to be your girlfriend/I’m just looking for a real good time alright, it’s so catchy. And empowering! Don’t just stand there looking dumb, baby YOU’RE the lucky one!
Alan M. shows up just in time to catch Josie mid-punk preening and startles her into knocking over a tower filled with CDs. Alan M. gets billed as “the sexiest man in Riverdale” at the start of the documentary, but you might remember him best as the guy who crowdsurfed to get to Josie at the band’s iconic final concert — I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but that’s the guy we’re talking about here! “You Don’t See Me” was def written about him.
Turns out Alan M. needs help with his truck, and Josie is some kind of mechanic whiz (did we know this?! was there a CosmoGirl! interview somewhere?). He’s strumming an acoustic guitar and singing Josie! Did I bust the carburetor? Overload the alternator? — “jump in any time!” and she sings abuse the accelerator in a way that actually makes me wonder how much autotune was used on her voice on their recordings because it sounds kinda different? I don’t know, I can’t explain it. Alan M. sings taking my truck for granted in a way that makes me wish HIS music career had popped off a little more!
Alan M. gets real close to Josie and starts asking her if she’s ever had something she really wanted to tell someone but didn’t know how . . . and she’s like, “you should tell them” and it turns out that Alan M. is just talking about a really smelly guy at work! God this is hard to watch. Like CLEARLY she thought you were going to tell her you had feelings for her, Alan M., stop being so dense! I got so caught up in this moment I forgot I was watching real life footage, it felt like a movie or something. Like these were just two characters I was DYING to get together.
The members of Josie and the Pussycats are splitting a single packet of ramen between them when their manager, Alexander, and his sister, Alexandra, come through the door. I always kinda assumed Josie and the Pussycats must’ve had management problems because like . . . look at how their career went, but Alexander is truly a joke. He missed their set because he was in line to buy DuJour tickets, which he tries to claim is because he was scoping out the competition!
Just when he and his sister leave, an MTV news alert comes on (god, do you remember that sound?! I had a visceral reaction when I heard it) that DuJour’s plane crashed somewhere near Riverdale. Their label, MegaRecords, has yet to release a statement but will be releasing a limited edition boxed set. Of course, now that we’ve seen some of the insider footage of this plane crash, this becomes all the more sinister. Do you think Serena Altschul knew? No, right? They show a brief tribute to DuJour, all dressed in orange inside their private Target-branded jet, with 2000-2001 printed at the bottom. To have made such an outsized impact on the music world in so little time! Seeing this tribute made me really sad, just thinking back on the band. I was a little young to truly grieve Kurt Cobain in real time, so this was one of the first celebrity/musician deaths I remember really affecting me.
Josie, on the other hand, takes the DuJour news as inspiration! Life is short! When the going gets tough, the tough make lemonade! The band packs up their instruments and leaves to make something happen!
There’s a ton of product placement — seriously, it’s kind of weird how all of a sudden it’s just nothing but shots of brands? I could go for a Starbucks latte tho. We see Wyatt from MegaRecords giving DuJour’s last single to a DJ at a MegaRecords store to start playing. The classic “DuJour Round the World” starts playing, and suddenly everyone has these ideas to buy orange clothes and start drinking Zima and stuff. I noticed the burned CD said “slave mix” on it but I couldn’t find that remix through Apple Music when I just searched it up, so I’m not sure what that’s about.
There’s a goth girl in the store who’s like, this song sucks, and Wyatt seems really interested to hear her “you laugh because I’m different, I laugh because you’re all the same” opinion, but then he ends up just shoving her inside a van!! Which immediately slams the door shut and speeds away. Okay, the plane crash stuff had me uneasy ngl but this was the first time when I thought, huh, maybe there IS something to the theory that this documentary was suppressed . . . like what the fuck! Wyatt jumps on the phone with a mysterious woman who threatens him that he better find a new band by tomorrow or he’s out of a job. Is this how the music industry works for real?! Does this finally explain Nickelback? (low hanging fruit, I’m sorry)
It turns out that Josie’s big plan was to set them up to play acoustic on the sidewalk, except a shop owner comes out to yell at them that he can’t sell all this orange stuff as long as they’re out there. “Last I checked, this was a free country,” says Valerie, in perhaps one of the most dated lines in the entire documentary.
In a TRULY fateful move, Wyatt has to brake to avoid hitting Josie and the Pussycats in the street, and it couldn’t be clearer that they are the exact band he’s been looking for. They’re standing there with their instruments, street lights lit up all around them, people walking in the background with a giant #1 Band in the World sign just in time for Wyatt to hold up a clear CD jewel case and see the vision. I swear this is even more iconic than when the Oneders played Villiapiano’s for the first time.
Wyatt calls them the “Pussyhats” but also whips out a contract right then and there. Josie, Melody, and Valerie are a little freaked out by the suddenness of it all and retreat to the bathroom to discuss, but ultimately it’s just too exciting AND Josie even finds a way to bring Alan M. along as her “guitar tech.” Their manager Alexander says to his sister that he doesn’t know why she’s there, and she says, “I’m here because I was in the comic book.” This documentary is so confusing, there’s so much going on!
Josie, Melody, and Valerie take out their Riverdale bus passes with all three of them in their photos and vow that they’ll always put friendship first and remember where they came from. When Wyatt goes up to the cockpit of the plane, the pilot seems almost ready to jump out again, like he did with DuJour, but Wyatt says they “won’t have any trouble with these girls.” You guys, I’m starting to feel like . . . something isn’t right here.
There’s a cute little makeover section where the Pussycats all get their hair done and pick out new clothes while their song “You’re a Star” plays. I’ve seen makeover scenes in movies before, but never in a documentary! I thought it was so fun. I also need to internalize the lyrics to this song more lol — I feel good, yeah, I feel fine/I’ve stopped complainin’ all the time/You’ll get yours and baby, I’ll get mine, yeah. I’m going to be honest, Josie’s hair looks exactly the same to me? Like what did they do to it?
They walk out of their makeover to see a giant billboard of them already up, which spooks Josie a bit since they haven’t recorded anything yet. “What if you don’t like it?” she wonders to Wyatt. “What if nobody likes it?” Wyatt says not to worry, “if you screw up we’ll just put somebody else up there.” lol heard
Valerie points out that the band name is wrong on the billboard — it should be the Pussycats, not Josie and the Pussycats — and Wyatt points out that studies show that bands with “and” in the title do twice as well as bands that don’t. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, you know, this checks out! Learn something new every day.
We finally that mysterious woman Wyatt was on the phone with before! She’s Fiona, the head of MegaRecords, and she’s taking a federal agent and a bunch of foreign delegates on a tour of the record company. The entire office becomes a giant elevator as she takes the whole group down to a futuristic basement level. “This,” she says, “is what our operation really does.” Okay now we’re cooking with gas! The ACCESS these documentarians had to get this inside look!!!
Basically, Fiona explains that MegaRecords is influencing a key demographic of people by putting subliminal messages into music. THIS is why you started saying “jerkin’!” THIS is why you dressed like Buffy meets Chicken Little for a hot minute!! I had to pause this part, it just blew my mind. I knew about backwards messages in songs, but I had no idea about any of this.
Fiona shows a short educational film hosted by . . . Eugene Levy! The dad from Schitt’s Creek! They must have him under a super tight NDA, I can’t believe he’s never even HINTED at this over the years. If any of the musical artists start getting wise to this scheme or making trouble, Fiona essentially comes right out and says that they handle it. Plane crashes, drug overdoses, band breakups . . . they do it all and then they even created the hit show VH1’s Behind the Music to explain it all. This is truly diabolical, how deep this goes. Do you think Pop-Up Video was involved in some way? Please don’t ruin my childhood!
Back with Josie and the Pussycats, they’re brought into an all-white studio to record some songs. And okay, in this lighting I DO see what’s different about Josie’s hair, it’s a slightly different color. I would’ve just maybe only done the over-styled hair flippy thing AFTER the makeover and not before, but obviously you don’t have that kind of control over subjects in a documentary.
Wyatt wants to show them the Megasound 8000, so the band plays a bit of “3 Small Words” while he records them on the machine. When they listen to the playback, suddenly vegetarian Melody wants a Big Mac and Valerie is excited to go to Foot Locker for some shoes and Josie is saying “jerkin’” out of nowhere. This is truly chilling now that we know what’s behind it! There are messages in the music!
But the girls are ready to play, and so they launch into “Pretend to Be Nice,” which I always thought was one of their MOST fun songs to sing along to. Why do you do what you do to me, baby?/Shaking my confidence, drivin’ me crazy/You know if I could, I’d do anything for you/Please don’t ignore me, ‘cause you know I adore you . . . I love the music video for this one with the sparkly silver outfits. And remember when the song climbed the charts to overtake “All Up in My Girl,” a song by the very same artist who directed their music video, Klank Fu?!?! A mild scandal at the time.
The band is super excited about their success, but Josie has another moment of misgiving. “Wait,” she says. “Does anyone else think it’s a little strange that all this happened in a week?” We see Wyatt immediately jump on the phone, but then they’re like “no!” and start celebrating again, so he hangs up. Do you guys think . . . I mean, is that how close Josie and the Pussycats came? To being disappeared? Before they actually disappeared?! This is turning into more of a true crime documentary than I had expected.
The same screaming girls who confronted Josie and the Pussycats as DuJour fans outside the bowling alley show up at their hotel room! “Josie and the Pussycats are our new all-time favorite band, of all time!” one of them shouts, and this is going to get stuck in my head a la that one NY-accented girl on TRL saying, “I’d like to request ‘God Must Have Spent a Little More Time on You’ because god, must have spent, a little more time, on Justin Timberlake, JUSTIN WE LOVE YOU!” I can just feel it.
The band is a little weirded out, but Wyatt says, “What’s the point of being famous if the people you hated in high school don’t want to kiss your ass?” and I do find it funny that I write under the same name I had in high school, but this honestly doesn’t really happen to me. Nobody is kissing my ass and I don’t hate anyone from that era strongly enough to really need that, so it’s all good.
Wyatt drops that Josie and the Pussycats have been booked for a stadium concert, which if I’m doing the math on the timing correctly I *think* is going to be their iconic sole/final concert with the cat ear fiasco thing and Alan M. crowdsurfing to get to Josie. We’ll see if I’m right.
And speaking of those cat ears! I don’t know how I STILL manage to be shocked by new revelations, but it turns out those were all part of another plot by Fiona to transmit messages directly into kids’ ears. I just thought they were a pointless cash grab, like when they have those light-up sticks they sell to kids at the circus. In the subliminal messaging, you hear the voice of Mr. Moviefone saying things like “Conform! Free will is overrated! Jump on the bandwagon!” We even see that the goth girl that Wyatt grabbed out of the record store is there, getting brainwashed by these headsets.
Valerie is back at the hotel room, watching a Behind the Music on Captain & Tenille talking about how they’d always said “friends first” but the band still ended up coming between them. Meanwhile, Melody is taking a shower with all McDonald’s-themed products that ngl I really want (a loofah shaped like a thing of fries?). She screams when she gets out of the shower to see “BEWARE OF THE MUSIC” written in red on the mirror, but then she adds a smiley face to the O and dots the I with a heart and is happy again.
Josie is getting ready to go to a big industry party hosted by MegaRecords when Alan M. shows up with pizza. Josie is looking FINE in a leopard-print dress with a very low back, and Alan M. NOTICES. She needs his help with a chain up the back of the dress and it’s a very hot moment! Between cameras in the shower with Melody and cameras on this, sometimes this feels a little TOO fly-on-the-wall if you feel me, but I don’t know all the ins and outs of ethical documentary filmmaking.
Wyatt shows up and pulls Josie away to get to the party, where the band feels totally out of place and we even get . . . their inside thoughts telling us so? Like did they go back in the studio and lay down voiceover for this scene, or were they ACTUALLY able to listen in on their thoughts?! After the cat ears incident, I’d believe anything.
Just once I want to enter a room like Fiona from MegaRecords — a jazz-y version of a pop song playing in the background, men lifting me up by the arms while I preen and pose down the staircase.
Fiona takes the band back into a bedroom decorated all in pink with pop art pictures of her on the wall, where she proceeds to put an potato chip on her plate and then not eat it because she’s “such a pig.” She also asks Josie how much she weighs and then crows when she’s three pounds lighter. Ugh. I remember all this diet culture bullshit from the early 2000s in particular, it was so insidious!! This was such a powerful moment, to see how Josie and the Pussycats were under this kind of pressure even from their label.
Fiona is trying to tell them how they’re pretty and popular, and their new song is pretty popular, but a sudden lisp makes her words come out funny. Valerie says “what thong?” and honestly, you knew what she was fucking saying, Valerie, there’s no reason to repeat it like that.
We see footage of the Pussycats afterward, discussing how something seems strange, and then we cut to footage of Fiona watching that very footage, this is so meta! Fiona doesn’t like that they’re asking questions and Wyatt says he can get a new band by morning, but Fiona says instead he should just find a way to get rid of the two Pussycats and have Josie perform on her own. They do that competing-evil-laugh thing that I thought only happened in movies.
Josie and Alan M. are at the aquarium, where he tells her about a gig he has that night, but then a bunch of fans spot Josie and lose their minds. They start chasing Josie and Alan M. through the aquarium, while “Shapeshifter” plays in the background. If you think that’s cool, whatever, dude . . . I sing that line to myself all the time.
They share a moment in front of one of the tanks, where Josie says she’s just a girl from Riverdale and she doesn’t know if she can do this, and Alan M. says that he’ll believe in her for the both of them. They allllllmost kiss, but then a guy in a scuba suit holding a sign saying he loves Josie knocks on the glass and interrupts them. Damnit, guy in a scuba suit!
Josie is talking to her bandmates about what song to open the concert with and references an unreleased track called “Roll On, Roll-y Wheel” but says the lyrics need work. Uhhhhhh does this song exist anywhere?!?! How have I never heard of it? What do we think the roll-y wheel symbolizes? What do we think is the vibe? Valerie is clearly distracted by how much Josie seems to be being centered in their band — she’s the one on soda cans, she’s the one on magazine covers, she’s the one on a leopard print blimp.
Wyatt shows up to tell the Pussycats that they’re going to be on TRL —without Josie — and Valerie is relieved when she sees that Josie doesn’t seem to care. Maybe it was all in her head, that everything was focusing on Josie and she was taking over the band? They go off to get ready for the show, while Wyatt tells Josie she needs to listen to the remix of their new single tonight. She says sorry, Alan M. has a gig, but Wyatt says that the gig was canceled. Josie thinks it’s strange that Alan M. wouldn’t have left her a message, if that was the case, and Wyatt makes a quick phone call. He says Alan M. said he wouldn’t be available for hours and Josie’s like, that was all in the message? and so Wyatt has to make another quick phone call. When Josie asks who he keeps calling, he says MegaRecords has other artists he has to deal with, which got me thinking . . . wait, do they? Have you ever heard of another MegaRecords artist that wasn’t Josie and the Pussycats or DuJour?
Meanwhile, Valerie and Melody show up at “TRL” only . . . it’s not TRL. The view outside is fake, the show title is spelled out in masking tape on a fake TV, and this Black guy comes out claiming to be Carson Daly. He says “check the nails” and he DOES have the same chipped black nail polish that Carson often had, so for a minute I was like, wait, is he? . . . but no, the real Carson Daly comes out and immediately mocks Melody and tells the fake Carson he has to stop pretending to be him. Who knew Carson was such a dick?
But it gets worse!!! It turns out that this isn’t Total Request Live . . . more like, Total Request DEAD. Carson and Fake Carson go after Melody and Valerie with baseball bats! This is SHOCKING! Does The Voice not do background checks on people? How has this never gotten out?!?!?
Josie is soaking in the bath and listening to the band’s next single, “You Don’t See Me,” while Alan M. tries to call her from the club where he’s reserved a table with a rose just for her. Ohhhhhh I can’t watch people get stood up, it hurts too much! Luckily Alexandra’s in the audience with a giant “I’m with the band!” sign, yelling at people who are disrupting Alan M.’s set by coming out of the bathroom right behind him. Alan M. dedicates his next song to “someone who couldn’t be here tonight” and it’s called “I Wish You Felt the Same.” Damn, Alan M., you’re just not subtle, huh? This is why you didn’t get what Josie was putting down when she thought you were talking about her and not some smelly guy at work.
Back at fake TRL, Fake Carson is going after Valerie and doing terrible impressions, and Real Carson and Melody are sharing a moment. “You know,” he says, “if I wasn’t a key player in this whole conspiracy to brainwash the youth of America with pop music, we could totally date.” Who HASN’T been here, am I right, ladies? Just kidding, this is wild. But Melody uses a cardboard cutout of Matt Damon from the audience to knock Carson off the bleachers, and she and Valerie get away.
They run back to the hotel room to tell Josie that something’s up and they think it has something to do with their music, but she is an absolute MONSTER to them. She’s basically like, why do you call it our music? When she’s the one who writes it all by herself and has all the talent. She throws the “who’s a rock star?” line in Valerie’s face by yelling “I am!” after Valerie as she runs out the room. Then she gets Melody to leave by saying the most awful shit I won’t even repeat here.
Everyone’s crying — Valerie as she packs, Melody as she looks at puppies, Alan M. as he stares up at a Josie concert poster while Alexandra clings to his arm, even Alexander as he weeps for the paisley pants that would match his paisley shirt. The only one not crying is Josie, striding confidently down the street still listening to her discman with the new single on it. We get this really cool shot right into the inner workings of the discman — early 2000s film technology was better than I thought it was! — to hear the subliminal messages that have been placed under the music. Basically, Val and Mel are mean, Josie should go solo, some of the terrible things Josie said to them word-for-word.
Josie starts running until eventually she trips and falls — which, I am NOT trying to be that guy, but maybe if she didn’t wear such INSANE heels all the time?! who wears those giant platform heels to the aquarium? A bunch of stuff falls out of her wallet, including her bus pass where she, Melody, and Valerie all crowded together into one picture, looking happy and close. Josie looks at the discman, seeming to understand that something sinister is going on. That’s what the music scoring this part suggests anyway!
Josie recruits Alexander and Alexandra to help her figure out what’s going on, and so she takes the CD into the studio to isolate all the tracks. And that’s how she hears the subliminal messages that have been there the whole time! Alexandra is impressed Josie got Mr. Moviefone for her CD, and accuses Josie of sleeping with him lol. Josie is determined to somehow destroy the Megasound and stop the brainwashing, but Fiona bursts in right then to stop her.
On TRL, Carson has his arm in a sling and is reminding people to make sure they get their cat ears so they can hear the Josie and the Pussycats concert. I wonder if I still have my ears somewhere, or if Mari Kondo brainwashed me into thinking they didn’t “spark joy” and I threw them out.
Backstage, we’ve come to the final confrontation! Josie tells Wyatt and Fiona that she won’t participate in their little games anymore, and they’re basically like, well, you have no choice. Josie tries to warn Melody and Valerie about what’s been happening with their music, but her bandmates are still too pissed at her to listen. (Valerie is, anyway, I don’t know if Melody is capable of being angry.) Fiona reveals her scheme for getting rid of the Pussycats with a pre-shot MTV news clip about a car exploding in the parking lot of the concert with Melody and Valerie inside. Okay, so Serena Altschul HAD to be complicit then!!! If she was filming these little bits of fake news!
Josie agrees to play the show to save her friends. The car is still rotating on its little showroom stage, and so Melody has to keep turning her head in different directions to look at Josie as she makes the plea for how she still loves them and didn’t mean to hurt them. I don’t know why this detail is so funny to me. The girls make up and all tell each other they love each other until Fiona gets fed up. “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream, everybody loves everyone,” she says sarcastically, and damn if I haven’t been there before.
Josie is all set to play — she looks pretty cool in her blue leopard print and blue guitar, ngl — and threatens Fiona that it’s going to be hard to sell her secret messages once the secret is out. “Who will believe you? Who will get behind the ridiculous ramblings of one silly, powerless girl?” Fiona says, and then suddenly! A rolling door opens and there stand the silhouettes of four guys. “We will!” they say.
“Who the hell are you?” Fiona asks, but even before “DuJour Round the World” starts up in the background we know!!! DuJour is alive!! This is the best fucking documentary I’ve ever seen, and I’m including The Thin Blue Line!
Turns out DuJour landed the plane just fine, but it was in the parking lot of a Metallica show so that’s how they got so beat up. It also turns out that it was DuJour who wrote that “BEWARE OF THE MUSIC” message in the girls’ bathroom. I love that the members of DuJour kept their individual branding even when in full body casts — Marco has flames drawn on his, for example, just like the tank he was wearing when the plane went down, Travis has his feather boa, etc.
While Fiona is distracted, Josie works to free her bandmates from the car. Fiona calls Riverdale “Shitdale” haha I don’t know why this low-hanging fruit kind of insult works for me every time, but Josie can’t take it anymore. She POUNCES on Fiona, crashing them into a craft services table while everyone starts to scrap. Valerie pulls Wyatt’s jacket over his head and starts punching him in the gut, and it turns out that Melody is some kind of martial arts genius because she takes down the bodyguards all by herself. Meanwhile Josie and Fiona have a slap fight lol. When Fiona goes to bring a guitar down on Josie’s head, Josie moves out of the way at the last minute and Fiona ends up destroying the Megasound 8000 instead. The cat ear headsets around the world start to freak out, with people in the concert crowd and home watching on pay-per-view ripping them off before their ears get blasted with all the high-pitched frequencies.
And that’s how we find out that the subliminal messages for this concert, the ones that were the culmination of this entire brainwashing plot, have just been . . . “Fiona is the most jerkin’ girl in the world?” “Everybody loves Fiona?” “She’s got the best hair?” WOW to think that ONE PERSON’S insecurities can manifest themselves in such a harmful and toxic way to an entire country, it’s terrifying to think about.
On the recording, Fiona takes over for Mr. Moviefone when she accuses him of not doing it right, repeating her messages about how if she were a girl she’d want to be Fiona’s best friend and stuff like that. Her voice on the recording starts revealing a lisp, and the real life Fiona also can’t keep the lisp out of her voice when she says that all she’s ever wanted was to be popular and is that so bad? Then Wyatt calls her “lisping Lisa” and it turns out that they know each other from the past! He was known as “White-ass Wally” because he’s “the albino kid” she remembers from Huntington High! Honestly there is just REVELATION after REVELATION here — he drops his British accent, wipes away his tan makeup, rips off his wig, and lets his stomach out, I just!!! My jaw was on the floor.
The feds show up!! When Josie tells them what’s been going on, the same agent we’ve seen plotting with Fiona this whole time suddenly acts like he had no idea. This is the kind of shit that’s all over those JFK papers, I just know it. They arrest Fiona and Wyatt! The agent leans over to confess to Fiona that they were about to shut down her operation anyway, they’ve found subliminal messaging works much better in movies.
FINALLY we get to the big concert. Josie notices that if she has her ears on, everyone lifts their own to their heads, and when she takes them off, they follow. “Stop!” she says. She says she’s going to play something new and different for them now, and it’s cool if they like it, it’s fine if they don’t, they should just decide for themselves. That is obviously the exact mentality I myself take whenever I release a new book, totally zen about it, I’m cool either way, just psyched that we all have free will and unfettered internet access it’s fun to be alive 😇
Josie launches into “Spin Around,” singing the na na na part alone before the rest of the band kicks in. I know I’m a broken record but I love this song — their music is just so good! Every song a banger! You can tell at first that the crowd doesn’t quite know what to do — without the cat ears telling them to like it I guess they really don’t know! But who’s immune to the power of the Pussycats, soon everyone is jumping around and yelling and into it.
And this is the part you probably remember, where Alan M. crowdsurfs his way to Josie. It always low-key bugged me that he did it in the middle of a song but I guess at least he waited until a breakdown part. It’s like listening to Paramore riff on “Misery Business” for a few minutes while they pull a fan to the stage to sing. But you could tell that this was all a surprise to Josie — even before seeing all the behind-the-scenes moments, I don’t think she could fake the genuine emotion when she sees him in the crowd. She’s not that good of an actress! Alan M. shouts that even though she doesn’t feel the same way about him as he does about her, and even though she didn’t come to his gig —
“Wyatt told me it was cancelled!” she shouts, and Alan M. says, “That dick!” which lol. Yeah. Alan M. says, “Josie McCoy, I —” and then the crowd drops him! But don’t worry, he gets right back up and finishes his sentence. “I love you!!!” Josie says she loves him, too, and that she always has. They share a kiss on stage while the bass and the drums are still playing it’s quite clear at times that Valerie is barely even touching her bass lol did we ever have an Ashlee Simpson-esque moment with these girls because sometimes I swear to god it’s like they’re not actually playing those instruments.
But who cares, the concert is awesome! Spin around and round and around and around/Never want to come back down/’Cause everything you’ve lost I’ve found, yeah . . . Alan M. is a goofy dancer! The girls are having the time of their lives! The crowd is loving it! Josie and the Pussycats is the best band in the world and no subliminal message is making me say that!!!!!
This might be the most important rockumentary ever made. It defies genre too, delving into true crime, politics, cultural criticism, it’s really an amazing piece of history (sorry, herstory!) and I’m so grateful I had the chance to witness it. My only criticism would be that at the very end, during the credits, there’s all this silly footage of everyone dancing and cutting up and I just don’t think that fits the serious tone of what this archival program has really achieved. But maybe there’s some symbolism to that, too, something about finding the joy and silliness even among the darkest times. I’ll have to watch it again to figure it out.
There’s currently a sweepstakes going on to give away a copy of Never Been Shipped! It runs through March 31, so just click on that link if you want to enter. Part of the reason why I had Josie and the Pussycats on the brain was because I’ve been revisiting some of my favorite music- or cruise-related content. I may do full write-ups of That Thing You Do! and Titanic at some point, just because I love those movies so much, but we’ll see. These posts are quite long, I totally get that lol. They are a labor of love!
Currently reading . . . I referenced The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz in a past newsletter and then I thought, you know what, I’ve never actually READ this book even though I reference it all the time so I should probably do that. It was available on Libby and only 150 pages long, so like two hours later I was able to say I’d read the book. It’s typical self help, I guess, in that on the one hand I thought it could’ve been a pamphlet and wasn’t that deep and on the other hand, I mean I DO find myself thinking a lot about whether I’m being impeccable with my word and not taking things personally, etc. And then there was this paragraph in the section about the Fourth Agreement — Always Do Your Best — that just absolutely took me out:
Forrest. Gump. I know this was 1997, but imagine with a STRAIGHT FACE using Forrest Gump as an example in this way. In a paragraph that then devolves into something else about not imposing your dream on anyone else, which I don’t even know how that relates to Forrest Gump maybe the way he got Lieutenant Dan in on his shrimp boat? I just want to say “A good example of this comes from the story of Forrest Gump” with one hundred percent earnestness at some point in my life. I actually think I may have already done it, there was a time when I referenced this movie a lot.
watching . . . After hearing my friend talk so much about how great the new Bridget Jones movie is, we ended up seeing it in a theater while we were in Ireland! This is one of those vacation experiences I really enjoy, where you’ve spent a charming day looking out over the water and walking around cute town streets and eating ice cream and stuff and then you’re like, you know what, fuck it, I want to see a movie. When you’ve had a full six days of museums and hotels and sites and dinners and you’re like, I just want to sit in a dark quiet theater and watch a MOVIE, that sounds amazing.
I really loved Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy! I laughed a lot, I teared up a LOT, I had to like, hold back at a couple parts because I was worried I’d make a really embarrassing squeaky emotional noise in the middle of the theater which is one of my niche fears, I just want tears to stream down my cheeks but no one to NOTICE if that’s all right, that’s why they make movie theaters dark!!! It was a surprisingly emotional movie! It made me feel so many things! And I honestly don’t know that I would’ve felt the same way if I hadn’t seen it in a theater, under these conditions, so I’m really glad I did.
I also started watching Bad Sisters on the advice of this friend, who was excited when we went to The Forty Foot because she said it’s featured on the show. I am SO HOOKED. It’s a dark comedy where the premise is that there are these five Irish sisters and when one of their husbands ends up dead, well . . . maybe they had something to do with it? He was an AWFUL man, like truly what this guy gets up to in the show will make your blood boil. And there are these two insurance agents who don’t want to pay out the insurance claim because it’ll bankrupt their business, so they’re investigating the death because they’re sure there’s something fishy to it (and hoping there is, for their own sake). It’s a brilliant show! I love the sisters, the setting is so pretty, the SWEATERS god I just want every single one even though I live in Florida so like when would I wear them?, and I genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen next from episode to episode. I highly recommend it!
listening to . . . Y’all know I’m a big Tegan and Sara fan but I was feeling lately like I didn’t give their newest record Crybaby as much attention and respect as it deserved. So I’ve been listening to that on repeat lately — it’s a really good album! Of songs that I feel like I’m “discovering” this go-around, I especially love “This Ain’t Going Well.” I keep wondering about the plans I had . . . it’s one of those songs where sometimes you’re singing along in the car and then suddenly you feel like there’s a lump in your throat and you’re like whoa where did that come from. Which is especially rough because I’m trying to hold that note out lol. I keep wondering what I do with them . . .
I somehow have never watched Josie and the Pussycats despite liking so many people in it! I'm gonna have to fix that. And Bad Sisters sounds like a really interesting show.
this was absolutely brilliant! i keep telling my wife that i need to show her this movie; it is a fundamental part of my high school identity!