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

[genie22.livejournal.com]

1. There had been girlbands before, but they'd not had the gimmick of a character name.
Not all of them were 'openly-pop' either.

2. No, cos it'd get tiresome.

3. Sit and wait for something more original.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I dunno about answers to the questions, but I can back up Geri's claim:

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

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

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

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.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

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)...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

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

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

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.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

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?

[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.

[damnspynovels.livejournal.com]

See, I always used to swear that maybe a year before Wannabe, I saw a report on Newsround announcing some Disney affiliated girl band... I was always convinced that this outfit was the Spice Girls....