Josie and the Pussycats (2001)

directed by Deborah Kaplan & Harry Elfont

Susannah Clark

I’m typing this with sore fingertips. Every time I strike a key, dull pain reminds me of my ongoing failure. My fingertips are sore because I do not have calluses. I do not have calluses because I don’t practice. I don’t practice because I am not a musician.

It took a pandemic for me to pull out my acoustic guitar for the first time in…three years? Certainly not since Donald Trump got elected. On day 23 of quarantine, I downloaded a tuner app and eked out some crude approximations of “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Wonderwall.” My boyfriend, who has the misfortune of sharing a one-bedroom apartment with me during an indefinite lockdown, recognized none of it.

Before the acoustic guitar it was an electric bass, a left-handed model that my father had to specially order for Christmas my freshman year of high school. I had begged him for months to buy me one, promising that I would practice, assuring him that I had come a long way from the fourth grader who cried on the way to and from piano lessons. He wiped off the dust and sold it on Craigslist after I left for college. I see now that I never actually wanted to be a musician (not enough to stick with it anyway). What I really wanted was to be in a band.

Josie and the Pussycats—in comic strips and on the cover of Seventeen magazine—made it look so fun. The film adaptation was released in April 2001, kicking off what would become the last summer of benign conspiracy theories. It was the first movie I saw by myself in the theater, when I was 12 years old. I lied to my parents, telling them I was meeting a friend there. I didn’t have anyone to invite.

At first glance, Josie and the Pussycats is a rock ‘n’ roll Cinderella story, with Chuck Taylors instead of a glass slipper. True to the source material, each bandmate plays an instrument and character trope: Josie (guitar, lead vocals) is the fearless leader, Val (bass) a healthy skeptic, Melody (drums) a ditzy babe. The jokes range from meta to absurd to slapstick to dumb blonde. But underneath the sparkly leopard print is a biting satire of consumerism and the music industry. Upon falling backwards into overnight success, the band uncovers a vast conspiracy in which the U.S. government is planting subliminal messages in pop songs to coerce young people into buying things. The resulting caper and stadium concert resolve to a familiar message of fetishized authenticity: be yourself, money can’t buy happiness, pop music is shallow.

At age 12, any anti-capitalist sentiment went over my head. When I watched the movie, I saw three impossibly beautiful women wearing their pants impossibly low, exuding confidence and coolness and best-friends-foreverness. I walked out of the mall movie theater and immediately bought the soundtrack and a pair of fuzzy leopard ears.

*

In high school I finally got to join a band. A totally fake one. We hatched the idea in the hallway one day, after someone commented on the fact that all five of us girls had similar hair. “The Brunettes”—it sounds like a band name! We all called dibs on what instrument we wanted to “play.” We wrote silly lyrics in our math notebooks. We had a few sleepovers with hairbrush microphone jam sessions. We even did a band photoshoot in front of our lockers; our “album cover” made it into the yearbook. We were literal posers.

We never actually deceived anyone—it was an inside joke, a pre-Instragram excuse to take sassy photos of ourselves. But for me, it was also a taste of the validation I so desperately craved throughout puberty. To be in a band was to make a concrete contribution to society, to be a character in a story. To be in a band was to belong. We each had our role, and even a fake role was something an insecure sophomore could hold onto. We were absolutely obnoxious, absolutely exclusive, absolutely a clique. And if you’re going to be in a clique, you might as well make it look like a productive one.

*

Josie and the Pussycats was a box office bomb, but critics have since re-evaluated it—or rather, people who saw the movie as teenagers have grown old enough to speak credibly in its defense. In an age when American Express cardholders get first access to concert tickets, the plot lampooning industry fat cats still resonates. But I’d argue that it’s the music that holds the film up. The soundtrack influenced a new generation of female singer-songwriters, including some of my heroes like Mitski and Eva Hendricks. The standout track, “Pretend to Be Nice,” was written by Adam Schlesinger, who recently died from complications of COVID-19 (I’d encourage you to read one of the many moving tributes to him written by his friends and collaborators). Like another one of his masterpieces, the titular song from That Thing You Do, “Pretend to Be Nice” is an exquisite melody, an utterly believable number one hit. In the film, the song is a bioweapon, brainwashing listeners into buying Big Macs and Adidas Superstars. But even without the subliminal message plot device, “Pretend to Be Nice” is hypnotic by its own merit. As a songwriter, Adam Schlesinger had something that can’t be taught. He wasn’t born to be a star; he was born to make music.

*

In a creative writing workshop a few years ago, a fellow student suggested that we go easier on one another while critiquing each other’s work.

“I was so devastated after my last workshop, I almost quit writing forever,” she said.

“Well then you probably should,” our professor deadpanned. The rest of the class exchanged shocked glances. He went on to explain that if harsh feedback makes you want to stop writing,  then you shouldn’t be writing in the first place. You shouldn’t be motivated by praise. A real artist will keep creating regardless of how their work is received.

I think about this whenever I pull out my guitar, wincing at every sour chord. In this case, the harsh feedback is coming from myself. I’ve heard about the 10,000-hour rule and Ira Glass’s “gap.”  I know that with some discipline and maybe a few more lessons I could eventually play a Taylor Swift song or two. But the rhythm just never got me. I think if I were built to be a musician, the impulse to keep trying would never have faded. That’s my excuse for making so many excuses.

And yet, I can’t bring myself to get rid of the guitar. Sure, it looks nice in our living room, and it's a fun activity for guests. But it’s also a telltale prop, a gentle nudge. You could do it, if you wanted (another Schlesinger gem). But for now, I’m still pretending. As a teenager, I thought “poser” was the absolute worst insult you could hurl at someone. But now I don’t think it’s so bad. At least posers still have some imagination left.

*

I’ve been videochatting with my high school friends during quarantine, something we hadn’t been doing regularly. We still call ourselves the Brunettes, even though we live entirely new lives on all four corners of the country. On Zoom, we gossip, we despair, we bellylaugh. I usually hide the box that shows my camera so that four squares fill my screen instead of five; a perfect rectangle with tiles of faces that have loved me as I’ve tried on so many different versions of myself over the past two decades.

We never cut a record, but we all turned 30 having done some pretty cool things; we’re explorers and mentors and activists; our fake guitarist grew up to be a real-life firefighter. I was hopeful early on that we’d be friends forever, but the thing I never foresaw as a teenager is how little our job titles or even our accomplishments would define us in adulthood. No one needs a role anymore. We just need each other.

Susannah Clark is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn. Her work has been published in Inside Higher Ed, PopMatters, under the gum tree, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for the Best of the Net anthology and the Pushcart Prize, and has a Notable essay listed in the 2016 Best American Essays anthology.