spice is nice

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

At the gym this morning I got all confused because a) they had GMTV on the screen where they usually have the BBC and b) because they were interviewing the Spice Girls and on the screen it said 'Today'. After I had realised that a) 'Today' was the name of the programme and b) this was not the real Spice Girls as they are now and c) nor was it a tribute band, I switched my headphones to the little box on the machine to listen to the interview. It turned out to be a repeat (well, duh) of the FIRST appearance of the Spice Girls on GMTV, TEN YEARS AGO TODAY. Sporty claimed that they were all 'naughty girls' and then they mimed to 'Wannabe'. ('We wrote it ourselves and we're really proud of that' says Geri.)

TEN YEARS since the first zig-a-zig-ah! Blimey, eh? Made me feel like a lot of time had passed, and that sort of thing. Now I may be mistaken, but I seem to remember a) that the Spice Girls were really quite important for pop as a whole (and I even went to see the MOVIE! In Leicester Square and everything! With freakytigger and a million small children. Err, and some other shifty-looking student-seeming types I seem to recall) and b) that they came totally out of nowhere. Of course, this may not be true.

So my questions for you:

Did the Spice Girls suddenly appear from nowhere and turn pop inside out?
Could something comparable happen today?
Can you imagine what it might be or by definition would this be impossible and we just have to sit and wait?

Comments

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

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.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

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

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

(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")

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

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!

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

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.