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

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

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.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

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.

[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?)

[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.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

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?