Bonus: No One Rocks The Mic Like DuJour, Ride On Your Motorbike With DuJour
With a sound crafted by Kenny ‘Babyface’ Edmonds and a fandom that has endured nearly 20 years, DuJour was the perfect satire of nineties boy band phenomenon writes Maria Lewis
For a tongue-in-cheek joke with little more than five minutes of screen time, DuJour shouldn’t be as well remembered as they are in 2020. Yet in a movie that poked fun at the state of the music industry in the new millennium – consumerism, commercialism, capitalism – there were few better vessels to do that with than an entity at the peak of their power: boy bands. Historically boy bands had been around for an age: The Beatles are a boy band, The Beach Boys, Jackson 5, The Osmonds, they all count as boy bands but that term started to mutate in the late eighties and into much of the nineties. By the end of the naughts, it was all over with One Direction and 5 Seconds Of Summer marking the end of the Westernised version of that, while BTS and the legacy of K-Pop bands took over in earnest.
Yet there was a specific period that changed the definition of the word ‘boy band’ forever – or at least cemented it - because a boy band is not just ‘a band full of boys’. That would make Metallica a boy band, NWA or Wu-Tang Clan boy bands which firstly – they ain’t nothing to fuck with - and secondly – lol. The OG boybands that shaped the sound and the genre though weren’t like the Backstreet Boys or *NSYNC, the two big names that people remember. They weren’t white: they were New Edition, Boys II Men, Blackstreet. They put out the best music of the boyband pop/RnB sub-genre and originated the formula that acts like New Kids On The Block, 98 Degrees, Take That and many others would follow.
To satirise the music industry in 2000/2001 like writers and directors Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont intended to do with their Josie And The Pussycats script, skewering boy bands had to be an essential part of that. From the charts and bleached blonde tips, to the Max Martin pop bubble-gum sound and cultural appropriation, every aspect of it was dominating the culture. Even South Park had poked fun at the phenomenon in their fourth season with an episode titled Something You Can Do with Your Finger, which aired right in the middle of Josie And The Pussycats physical shoot in Vancouver, Canada.
DuJour open the movie and from the soul patches to Seth Green’s character Travis wearing a literal hat on a hat, people who love this movie instantly understood what DuJour meant.
“The minute that Backdoor Lover started I was like ‘I’m in!’,” says Forrest Satchell, a Josie And The Pussycats obsessive and expert on the Hanna-Barberra cartoon series. “I got what the movie was saying. I totally got that it was really a social commentary on all the boy bands and all the marketing, you know, Britney and Christina … I was in love with that movie from the first moment I saw it.”
Kaplan and Elfont had come through college during the grunge era and it was hard for the two of them not to feel like “something insidious” was going on with music as people became brainwashed into conformity. In order to take the piss out of not just boy bands but the boy band sound, they had to get someone to recreate it and that man was Kenny ‘Babyface’ Edmonds. The name Kenny Edmonds might be one you only recognise if you’re in the industry, but the moniker Babyface you know. He’s a legendary music entity who has won 11 Grammys and written and produced songs for the likes of Whitney Houston, TLC, Toni Braxton, Madonna, Mariah Carey, Michael Jackson, Sisqo and his own boy band Dru Hill, Ariana Grande and - crucially for this project - *NSYNC. “Kenny brought in the DuJour sound,” says Kaplan. “We would never have been able to produce that nonsense. We wrote the lyrics in the back of a car like ‘nobody rocks the mic like DuJour, ride on your motorbike with DuJour’. I don’t even know where we were going.” The pair were actually in Vancouver, scouting shooting locations for the upcoming production which would take place over the next few months. “Backdoor Lover was in the script,” says Elfont. “But we needed that other DuJour song they were gonna play, so we were like ‘oh, let’s just write the most inane song possible’.”
A lot of the heat and love is directed at the songs Josie and the Pussycats sing in the movie – correctly so – but considering there’s only two DuJour tracks on the album, they have a pretty heady legacy of their own. “Oh my God, DuJour, far out - I still love that song too!” says Amandah Wilkinson, frontwoman of the band Bossy Love and someone who was so inspired by the film Josie And The Pussycats she started her own teenage rock band, the ARIA Award-winning Operator Please. “What’s so funny is there are some noises in that song that I use in Bossy Love songs. There’s samples from (DuJour Around The World) and that whole era of RnB and groove, which is hilarious because they were a bunch of white boys. That’s like my shit, I still love that song even though it’s supposed to be jokey and lame.”
Another band who DuJour had a big influence on was Charly Bliss, with brother and sister combo Sam and Eva Hendricks being hugely shaped by the Josie And The Pussycats movie as they were growing up. “Eva and I both had huge pop punk phases that lasted a very long time,” says Sam, who’s Bliss’ resident drummer. “It’s still seeping through into our music taste now. These are just objectively great pop punk songs. Let’s not forget about DuJour, I mean give me a break … we were boarding the plane to Sydney just a few days ago and as a reflex we were singing along to Backdoor Lover, like all the words, all the riffs.” Eva adds: “Sam’s favourite riff of all time is from Backdoor Lover.”
Backdoor Lover heralds the beginning of the film in earnest, with the lyrics and the choreography – which the boys made up themselves – one of the most memorable parts of Josie And The Pussycats even though they’re a minor portion of the overall runtime. In fact, Josie herself – Rachael Leigh Cook – still counts DuJour as “my favourite part” of the movie even now. DuJour was made up of Seth Green, Donald Faison, Breckin Meyer – who was engaged to Kaplan at the time – and Alexander Martin playing Travis, D.J (there always has to be a band member with an initialled name), Marco and Les. All of the lads had come over from Kaplan and Elfont’s debut movie – Can’t Hardly Wait – where, with the exception of Green who had a bigger part, the others all had small but memorable cameos. That was back in 1997 and when they got around to shooting Josie And The Pussycats in 2000, all of the DuJour members were blowing up in various ways.
Meyer had been in the second best Nightmare On Elm Street movie – Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare – then back-to-back teen hits Clueless and The Craft, before the ill-fated 54, Go, Road Trip and Rat Race (which dropped just after Josie And The Pussycats in 2001). In summary, he was popping up frequently and had become a familiar nineties face just like his BFF Seth Green. The latter had been working since he was a kid, but had also hit an amazing run with Idle Hands, Enemy Of The State, Austin Powers sequel The Spy Who Shagged Me, Rat Race, and - importantly - the werewolf who loved a witch and executed dry delivery on the daily: Oz in Buffy The Vampire Slayer from 1997 to 2000. Faison was shooting Scrubs, which hadn’t come out yet and gone on to become that iconic comedy that it would be. Yet he was on a streak too – the Clueless movie, the Clueless TV show, another Archie Comics spin-off property co-created by the same man (Dan DeCarlo) who was behind Josie – Sabrina The Teenage Witch – and Remember The Titans. With limited shooting time with the lads as a group on their ascent, a lot of the DuJour magic came down to their chemistry as a quartet.
Obviously yes, Kenny ‘Babyface’ Edmonds carefully crafted the songs, Kaplan and Elfont had come up with those hilarious lyrics and killer dialogue, but there was plenty of improvisation as they fulfilled the staple roles of every boy band: the cute one, the bad one, the closeted one, the ethnically ambiguous one and so on. All four of them were close mates in real life, which made working with them “the easiest thing” according to Elfont. It also gave them more confidence to fuck around and push the boundaries. “The hard thing was how many days is it,” says Elfont. “Because they were all working. So we figured out how to make it two days for them: it was one day on the tarmac, then another day on the interior of the plane. Then there was this other day floating where they had to come back for the big showdown and that’s why they’re in body casts, because it’s not them – obviously it’s not them.”
Adding another layer to it, Faison knew about the churn and turn of the manufactured boy band machine intimately: his younger brother had been in one called Imajin who had just a single album come out through Jive Records before they got chewed up and spat out by the industry as another Jive act took off instead … Britney Spears. They weren’t the only ones: the Brits had a crack with 5ive, East17, Boyzone and Westlife, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and Dru Hill added some melanin to the conversation and both featured on Mariah Carey’s best album (Butterfly), the Aussies had Human Nature, New Zealand gave us Kulcha – who popped up as the musical guests in season one of Heartbreak High performing their big hit Shaka Jam – and Purest Form. That final act was more Boys II Men than Backstreet Boys but were hugely significant because they were the first all-Polynesian group to have major chart success in New Zealand, which hadn’t really happened since Poi E became a phenomenon in 1984.
DuJour dropped in the middle of all that and became a poignant time capsule. In fact, even though Josie And The Pussycats was a box-office flop and didn’t do great critically either, it’s emergence as a cult film in the past decade is partially to do with DuJour finding another life in the age of social media memes and reaction gifs. A Josie And The Pussycats sequel might have never been a viable option, but according to Kaplan and Elfont DuJour and the sentiment surrounding them endured so much so that a spin-off movie was on the cards. “We almost did a DuJour movie a couple of years ago,” says Kaplan, with Green and Meyer part of the pitch to Netflix. “It was all about them reuniting. They had a massive falling out.” Their pitch was delivered before the 2016 film Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, which Elfont says was part of the issue because they covered many of the same themes. “We couldn’t call it DuJour because that was Universal. We just kinda named it something else: it would’ve been DuJour but we were gonna call it … Foursome.”
The Lonely Island and Judd Apatow’s Popstar had a few other things in common with JosieAnd The Pussycats: it too was released by Universal and was a box-office flop. Like its predecessor, it was very funny and very witty, with Andy Samberg playing a grown up riff on Justin Bieber with music that was very DuJour-esque in an updated, 2016 way. Maybe one day we’ll get Foursome, that DuJour movie, and maybe we won’t. Thankfully one thing we’ll always have is that perfect few minutes with our backdoor lovers.
This article is a written version of the Josie and the Podcats bonsu episode DuJour. Josie And The Podcats is a limited podcast series hosted by best-selling author, screenwriter and journalist Maria Lewis, and produced by Blake Howard of One Heat Minute. New episodes release every Sunday, with bonus episodes during the week.
