The Don't Cha Edition

On music, rights, and the twisting history of a pop song.

As life re-starts, we’re re-running some favorite, years-old editions you may have missed. A fresh, new year of WITI begins next week.

Colin here. At the gym this morning, the Pussycat Dolls’ track “Don’t Cha” was playing. The spare, bare-bones gym tends to veer between Rage Against the Machine, country, and iconic pop hits depending on who is steering the algo. But, mid-rep, I remembered a particularly interesting backstory to the song. The original version was by Tori Alamaze, a former aesthetician and backup singer for OutKast, and written by CeeLo and Busta Rhymes. But on her track, the vibes couldn’t be more different than what made it out to the broader public. Her version is dark, with a melted-sounding kick drum and a slightly sinister and sultry feel. It was just outstanding.

Critics also liked it. A Wikipedia dig tells me that Saptosa Foster of Vibe described it as “sultry,” Salon’s Thomas Bartlett commented that the song is “strange, sad, and astonishingly good.” Stylus Magazine, an authority at the time, included it in their rankings of the best singles from 2004.

The song got some radio play on Power 106 in Los Angeles in 2004, which led to a signing by Universal Music.

I remember Philip Sherburne, one of modern culture’s best music writers, diverting from his coverage of interesting minimal techno at the time to write a thoughtful piece about the track he heard on another station on his now-defunct blog at Abstract Dynamics:

I heard a song on the radio that almost caused me to drive their car right off the road. It was R&B, but it sounded unlike any other R&B in the pop radio spectrum — spookier, synthier, not unlike the warbly German techno I tend to favor, really. Organs hovered in the middle distance of the FM waves like echoes of Lawrence or Superpitcher — others have even compared them to This Heat — and the molten ride cymbals sounded as sour as Closer Musik’s. The drums boomed deep enough to make “The Whipser Song” sound wispy. And despite saucy lyrics (”Doncha wish your girlfriend was hot like me/ Doncha wish your girlfriend was a freak like me”) — and the fact that the whole song was adapted from Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Swass” — the singer’s alternatingly hectoring and defeated tone dragged the song to abject depths rarely heard in pop. What the fuck was this doing on a station that announced itself, in a subwoofer-assisted voice, as “Portland’s party station!”?

Normally, catching a critic of Sherburne’s caliber would portend good things, but things took a strange and very pop turn.

Why is this interesting?

Due to disagreements with Universal, Alamaze walked away from the track. Unhappy with the label, she agreed to give up the rights to walk from the contract. “I feel like I got caught up in the middle of egos and favors,” she told the Times.

Based on its songwriting merits, it was taken to a burlesque cabaret act called the Pussycat Dolls and, well, dolled up into top-50 fare, shedding its late-night strip club darkness and taking on a different radio-friendly sheen and polish. But the original version remains, and every few years, somehow, I find my way back to it, often reminded when I hear the newer version of the track. The revisit is always worth it. (CJN)