Since the advent of MTV, the music video has been an absolutely integral part of the Girl Group experience. Groups have made their careers off one eye-catching video, had their images cemented, and became a part of pop culture history. It’s hard to picture an era when you couldn’t watch one such clip of the newest girl group and instantly learn everything you needed to about such a group — their look, their collective and individual personalities, even their relationship to all the other girl groups to come before them. (And really, can you imagine what great videos the Supremes or the Shangri-Las would’ve made?)

Here is Billboard’s list of the 10 most iconic girl group videos. Only videos that achieved a great deal of popularity within the U.S. were included — sorry, Sugababes or Girls’ Generation fans — since this is a list for the videos that pop fans should be able to recall instantly, possibly as even the first thing that comes to mind when they think of the group at all. And if you notice that it’s been a while since the last video on this list… well, it’s on the next generation of girl groups (Little Mix, Fifth Harmony, Stooshe) to do what they can to add to it.

Pussycat Dolls feat. Busta Rhymes, “Don’t Cha” (2005, dir. Paul Hunter)

“Don’t Cha” presented the Pussycat Dolls — a prefab, burlesque-turned-pop outfit, which makes them perhaps the girl group-iest girl group ever — as a virtually unstoppable army of seduction, with seemingly dozens of sexy, stone-cold members waiting in the wings to pop out at any given moment, jumping on a trampoline or drag racing in a Jeep. And of course, the attack was led by the impossibly alluring head Doll Nicole Scherzinger, wearing a hoodie with the lyrics to the song’s coolly evil chorus emblazoned across the top.

It was inevitable that the song and video would become massive, and become massive they did, with the song heating up the Hot 100 chart and the video establishing the group as mainstays on MTV for many subsequent (though not quite as memorable) videos to come. Scherzinger would eventually leave the group, and the Dolls’ original lineup would disband, but you can still buy her white hoodie from the video on eBay for $40.

Source: billboard.com