Lock Up Your Daughters: The Pussycat Dolls Are Coming Back

noah | March 24, 2008 1:15 am
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And this time, led by surgically enhanced founder Robin Antin, the pack of 360-dealed dance-pop singers is going to aggressively market itself to the same preteens who are currently concerning themselves with the doings of the Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus:

Eleven female contestants — all about age 20 and competing for places in Girlicious, the Pussycat Dolls spinoff group the show will found — were to perform to an audience of tween girls, the age group that made Miley Cyrus so popular that she was an Oscar presenter this year.

“This is part of the key demographic you want buying your CDs,” intoned Antin. “They’re the ones that dictate the future of music.”

And the music industry needs them, if only because the tweens are largely believed to still purchase CDs. If junior high kids weren’t entirely responsible for what Nielsen SoundScan estimates as 2.8 million copies sold of “PCD,” the debut album from the Pussycat Dolls that contained the (still) inescapable single “Don’t Cha,” Antin knows they accounted for a sizable percentage.

“If you go to a Pussycat Dolls concert, it’s all these little girls, and they all have on their hoodies,” Antin said recently in the family room of her modest one-story West Hollywood home. “When I first started the Pussycat Dolls, I never would have imagined that would become our target audience. But it makes so much sense. My idea, from the very beginning, was to have sort of live dolls, dancing and singing. That’s what these girls relate to.”

The thing that makes this “marketing women who are merely ‘living dolls’ and don’t have much interesting to say or offer except the flaunting of their bodies, which are pretty obviously temporary attractions based on the way that the group is completely interchangeable with the possible, but not probable exception of Nicole Scherzinger” ethos even more depressing? Antin’s brother Steve, who had the idea to transform the PCD burlesque show into the music/reality-TV juggernaut that it is now, was in The Goonies. Talk about your stark, depressing differences between the aimed-at-kids pop culture of then and now–just try and imagine La Scherzinger singing something like “The Goonies R Good Enough.” The lack of superobvious lyrical references to her vagina would probably make her choke.

Pussycat Dolls run hurdles in high heels [LAT] [Photo: AP]