A kung fu fighter in a disco

i saw the movie in leicester square also! possibly at the same screening! premature harmonic convergence of poptimist forces!

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spittake.livejournal.com

I saw the movie in Paris!

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Did the Spice Girls suddenly appear from nowhere and turn pop inside out?

Yes! It had been ages since Bananarama and anyway SPice Girls operaetd on a much higher level than them. The first time I heard/saw 'Wannabe' on TV I thought it was awful and that the girls would not go anywhere.

Could something comparable happen today?

You would think so but apparently not.

Can you imagine what it might be or by definition would this be impossible and we just have to sit and wait?

Gorillaz-style CGI version for GURLZ, produced by yer man Higgins. Or not.

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Haha this is the opposite of my post!

(btw in response to yesterday - the new Pussycat Dolls single is actually ace, what irked me was the emptiness of the criticism which ran along the "ew they're vacuous tarts and who does snoop dogg think he is" line => peter robinson does not really like pop)

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DUDE!!! I checked the Guide -- It was JOHN ROBINSON NOT PETER ROBINSON!!!

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Oh god there are two of them.

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carsmilesteve.livejournal.com

haha, it is YOU who are the r4cial1st! these robinsons all look the bleeding same innit...

i thought PR hadn't done the singles for ages...

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They didn't seem to come out of nowhere at the time - I remember the Smash Hits review of 'Wannabe' basically reading "ooh another Shampoo but shoutier how excellent". Although it's tempting to see Shampoo as the proto-Spices, the formula they built on and added to - I can see a similarly indie band like The Pipettes functioning in the same way now. Except Shampoo were great and The Pipettes are shit. But yeah - a manufactured girl group based around those old-school stylings, the doo-wop sound, harmonies and so on - and then that could be linked to what r&b is doing at the moment, also harking back to Prohibition-era glamour (Xtina, Beyoncé)...

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boyofbadgers.livejournal.com

No, Shampoo were sh1t, for v.similar reasons to The Pipettes.

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The proto-Spices for 2006 should really be Shimura Curves.

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too indie ;)

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altho i would welcome a Fuzzbox-esque element reinstalled in today's pop climate.

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jauntyalan.livejournal.com

shampoo were TOTALLY essential to the how the spices presented themselves

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carsmilesteve.livejournal.com

~~they even had a song called GIRL POWER~~

this post has been removed by the USE OTHER FACTS PLEASE dept.

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katstevens.livejournal.com

Shampoo were ace! They wrote 8.33% of the songs! 4REAL

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wasn't the "new" thing a proto-reality TV aspect? ie that they lived out the drama of their "manufacture" in mass tabloid public -- surely they were the first of this kind of operation to flourish in the era of tabloids-filled-with-pop (inc.the fact that tabloid morality carries somewhere in a fair amount of rockist moralism)

ie their performance is what happened on the tabloid page as much as on-stage or on record or celluloid

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But that's really just the Monkees in the 90s, isn't it?

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the UK tabs didn't exist in the monkees era! and had no interest in or coverage of pop before the mid-80s

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I think the judge is pointing in the right direction. it was more than the Monkees because AT THE SAME TIME that the Spice Girls hit big everyone else was transformed into Wannabes. (But not cause and effect running either way: i don't think this is a case of world getting what it deserves, a band for the times etc. UNLESS culture is always running to catch up with underlying conditions, and they just happened to get there first, which I don't think is the case.) I guess I want to link the 'invention out of nothing' factor with the 'spirit of the age' thing and the two probably don't go together very easily, if at all.

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They seemed to "come out of nowhere" to me, but not in the sense of not having any antecedents. They were a silly, brash pop group and those have obviosly been around since the beginning of time. The "out of nowhereness" (is that a Hard-Fi quote?) relates to them blowing up and towering over the pop landscape for years. Pop usually gets turned inside out only when that happens -- viz. Beatles, Pistols, Nirvana, "Walk This Way" by Run DMC ft. Aerosmith perhaps -- although there are also underlying tidal movements as well.

Something like that is always possible, although it's usually impossible to predict who, and I think it usuallly happens when we've played out all our current idols, and current trends are already too grey to support new idols.

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So we've reached a state too entropic to allow for anything to emerge from the murk? I'm tempted to agree, but more on the grounds that the distribution of pop across various marketing sectors and niches is so consolidated that nothing could take occupy the centre so fully as the Spice Girls did.

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alex i think this is nonsense -- the "state of things" is not a state of nature, it is a system of evolving machineries -- there is ALWAYS scope for someone to rise and start actively gaming the set-up, plugging process x into process y, ignoring or overriding the academicism of procedure

i restate my claim that the most culpable failure of present-day "rock" -- ie the zutons etc -- is its COMPLETE lack of gumption when it comes to this kind of project

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(haha i am in the middle of an argt elsewhere than here about why foopball is good = because for certain key players the field of play extends DEEP INTO THE REFEREE"S HEAD -- this is not going down well and i have been called a "snot")

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I did say 'tempted': i.e. I agree with you but recognise in myself a temptation to reach for the lazy idea that everything has come to an end!

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You may have an argument there in terms of distribution, but my (poorly worded) point was more that someone really transforms the pop landscape when we've reached a point where everything is sludgy. So a new act that is quite good yet essentially "of" the existing, dominant idiom can't get much traction because we're all already tired of that idiom.

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But I mean NOT 'was this a new type of girl-band / could we have a new girl band now' BUT: did something happen to 'pop' - to its institutional structures, deep mythologies and modes of production and distribution. e.g. i) Did the spice girls break open the tween and under market? ii) The merchandising thing has been well documented, but has this lasted out? (my guess is NOT, at least, not on that scale) iii) Did the spice girls herald the end of Smash Hits / ToTP by making pop massive and thus triggering a future rock backlash -- or was the fact that they were everywhere the last time a group could have that much of a grip on the public consciousness?

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i'm inclined to believe yes, to both of the last two points! altho Coldplay do seem to come close to Spice Girls re global awareness and popularity (and they certainly attract the same level of ire among some factions) - which seems bad.

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Are you saying the tween market had never been broken before? That seems difficult to accept. Does anyone remember Tiffany, teen who broke big in the 80s (did she chart in the UK?) with "I Think I We're Alone Now" via incesseant touring of shopping malls in the US. My point being that people have marketed to that group for years.

I get a little tired of the "end of pop" talk because all this runs in cycles. I can tell you as a teen I remember suffering through the hair metal years, thinking there would never be a decent "rock" band again; suffering through boybands and thinking there would never be a decent guitar band again; etc. This too will pass. Admittedly, as noted above, media markets are so segmented now and we all live in our iPods that it's hard to imagine any one group holding EVERYONE's attention for particiularly long.

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I'm a big believer in the cycle thing too, and in my academic work I've spent a lot of time arguing against the 'end of X / closure of Y' discourse which is rampant in the academy (injects pathos and excitement into tedious work I guess) -- and I agree with your point above (I was trying to map this out a bit in phrasing the third question) that someone really transforms the pop landscape when we've reached a point where everything is sludgy. So a new act that is quite good yet essentially "of" the existing, dominant idiom can't get much traction because we're all already tired of that idiom. i.e. the 'new' thing has to break with existing parameters BUT as a result anyone trying to 'break with existing parameters' has to take random punts which may or may not work. (This is what I think Lily Allen's people are trying to do, in part).

i.e. I KNOW that it's a common error to imagine that you are living through the worst times, but that doesn't seem to preclude a relative estimation of better and worse. And recognising a certain lethargy, can I hope that something will come along sooner rather than later? Well, no, there are no grounds for believing that something WILL happen, or that it will happen at any particular time. Also I have to accept the possibility that the new thing has ALREADY happened, but I've missed it.

I often think the 'every year is the best year of pop' strategy is safer, since it stops you getting into these sorts of discussions. Unfortunately if it means trying to like The Automatic, I'm off to boil my head.

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koganbot

In the U.S. there was no Shampoo; I'd think TLC'd be the relevant predecessors, and some other little girl r&b acts whose names escape me (and Brandy and Monica and Aaliyah and whoever). And no way did the Spicies dominate U.S. pop, what with all those r&b teenyweenie girls doing something somewhat different, and hip-hop of course, and rock still rocking around (Butthole Surfers and Primus were scoring hits in those days, remember). But given that, it opened the way for the Spicies to really discover/create a tweenie 'n' pretweenie market way way way beyond what New Kids much less Tiffany had done. Spice Girls fans were almost all girls age 3 to 15, huge among 8 year olds, 6 year olds, 4 year olds, the wee ones not just being an adjunct to the teenybopper audience but a big part of it. And as Alan says below, little girls going for girls rather than boys is a HUGE shift, happening much more for the Spice Girls than for TLC and Tiffany (and Madonna was something else, since she's never relied on the teenies as her prime audience, though of course her attitude is an influence). Spicies just scooped up a market that had previously gone to Monkees-Partridge Family-Bobby Sherman-Jackson 5-New Edition-Bay City Rollers-Osmonds-New Kids. And even with Backstreet Boys and *NSync and Jesse McCartney and B5 coming along since, most of the stars are girls.

(Question, since I paid no attention to the Osmonds. How important to culture was Marie?)

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koganbot

As for 2006 being niched and sludged and fragmented into ineffectiveness: no more or less than 1996, which had no clear direction that I could tell. Gangsta was still continuing to gangsta, grunge was grunging on, there were some glimmers from Timbo. Beck and DJ Shadow were considered the important artists, Sleater-Kinney and Fugees the hot new things. Stereolab. Smashing Pumpkins. Tricky. Wilco. Sublime. Oasis. Pulp. Sheryl Crow - she was really good then, and if I recall correctly, outselling the Spice Girls. Quad City DJs "C'Mon N' Ride It (the Train)" won the P&J singles poll, and their southern big bass electro-novelty was more a harbinger of what was to come musically than the Spice Girls were.

Btw, Spice Girls impact on what subsequent U.S. pop sounded like was negligible.

So what might be breaking big now, whether noticed or not? Well, I can't tell, but maybe hyphy and snap and bubblecrunk and whatever you'd name the category for "My Humps" could break out as the strange new half-minimalist novelty bubblegum, probably not "real" enough to go superbig, but bubblegumming under. Might depend on whether The Packs' "Vans" breaks out beyond California and Miami. And emo, goth, and teen confessional rockpop are all continuing to merge with who knows what effect. What if Meg & Diana blow up big? (I never much listened to Jewel or Vanessa Carlton, but think of Meg & Dia taking that stuff and deciding to rock loud with it.) Life continues to be surprising.

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well there was no such thing as a 'tween market' when Tiffany or Bananarama were big...if you see what i mean. and neither of them were anywhere near as big as the Spice Girls in the end.

i don't know about the cycles thing because most noteworthy art today is too interlocked with technology and technology is perhaps not cyclical?

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jauntyalan.livejournal.com

they were the first GIRL band for a while - pop had plenty of BOY bands up to around then meant to appeal to the same market, but this was the first time GIRLS AS ROLE MODELS instead of BOYS AS DREAMY/W@NK was used.

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