Poptimists Spice Special!
Jan. 20th, 2006 01:14 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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poptimistsOne of the great things about 2006 is that it is the 10th anniversary of SPICEMANIA. Summer 96 was when Wannabe got to No.1 and Changed Pop Forever.
How better than to celebrate than with an BIG POLL? How about with a big poll and a great pop song! "Take Me Home", a link to which won't appear in this post, is the B-Side of "Say You'll Be There" (I think, botherd if not), and starts off with one of the Spices imitating Tricky (!) and then turns into a bit of a 'dark' number. Very good record, if you don't already know it.
[Poll #656277]
How better than to celebrate than with an BIG POLL? How about with a big poll and a great pop song! "Take Me Home", a link to which won't appear in this post, is the B-Side of "Say You'll Be There" (I think, botherd if not), and starts off with one of the Spices imitating Tricky (!) and then turns into a bit of a 'dark' number. Very good record, if you don't already know it.
[Poll #656277]
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Date: 2006-01-20 01:37 pm (UTC)last year i got both* spice girls albums in a charity shop for 50p each; BARGAIN.
*we do not acknowledge the third one
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Date: 2006-01-20 01:38 pm (UTC)OK will gmail everything today and work bandwidth limits be damned.
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Date: 2006-01-20 02:04 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2006-01-20 02:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 03:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 02:45 pm (UTC)http://www.houseoflyrics.com/d/artists/spice_girls/songs/spice_invaders.html
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Date: 2006-01-20 02:55 pm (UTC)(the one grudging nod by
Best SG single = too difficult
Posh was my fave then, Emma now.
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Date: 2006-01-20 03:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 03:10 pm (UTC)Frank Kogan
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Date: 2006-01-20 03:33 pm (UTC)the oddest thing I found was that I didn't really fancy any of them evah which also set them out a bit, assuming other people felt the same way as me. none of them had an anodyne sex-doll look and there was that down-to-earth aspect that appealed. whether consciously or not, this may have helped push the strength of the songs further (but in the press of course the empthasis was regularly on the girls sex appeal (or Mel C's supposed lack of) and their antics).
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Date: 2006-01-20 03:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 03:51 pm (UTC)maybe we should be saying it was Fuller and Cowell who changed Pop, but that would be dull.
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Date: 2006-01-20 03:54 pm (UTC)Proto-Westlife songs: "Mull of Kintyre", "Sailing", little else. Boyzone yeah I'll grant you but there's a heft to Westlife which BZ didn't have.
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Date: 2006-01-20 03:58 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2006-01-24 12:39 pm (UTC)(this is lex, this computer won't let me log in)
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Date: 2006-01-20 03:56 pm (UTC)(1) Don't underestimate the Girl Power thing. Commercially, the Spice Girls weren't just another girl group - Shangri-Las or Supremes or TLC. Rather, they were the ones who conclusively established that little girls were going to buy girls as much or more than they were going to buy boys, which changed teenybop. Even with the subsequent success of Backstreet Boys and *NSync and Aaron Carter and Jesse McCartney, the "teen" charts are now a girl thing, Hilary and Gwen and Kelly and Avril and Lindsay and JoJo and and Vanessa and Ashlee and Rihanna and Raven all being the beneficiaries. Jesse aside, most of the boys are there as novelties: Bowling for Soup, Barenaked Ladies, Smash Mouth, Mr. C, Akon, Hampton the Hampster (though Yellowcard is a genuine boy-rock presence). Of course, that's in the USA. I don't know about Britain.
(2) The Spice Girls' success really put the quotation marks around "teen," since the Spicies weren't just hitting big with the 12-year-olds but with the 8-year-olds and the 3-year-olds, and they really established the kiddie music market as something distinct from even the teen market of old. My friend Naomi, mother of three girls, once remarked that if L'Trimm had come along at the time of the Spice Girls rather than back in '89, they'd have been millionaires, because the market and the distribution system would have now been established for them.
Also, for better or worse, the Spice Girls sexualized and stylized pre-teen girl fashion to a much greater extent than it had been before. (Not that their success was the only thing to do this, of course. Kiddie movies and cartoons had been heading in that direction.)
(3) I haven't commented on the musical influence; my guess is that it's mainly a European thing, a style of r&b that doesn't mimic the North American Mariah-TLC-Destiny's Child line and after the Spice Girls didn't cross to the U.S. but possibly exists in the sound of the Sugababes, Amy Diamond, etc. ("Etc." indicating that I don't really know what I'm talking about.) Etc.
Frank Kogan
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Date: 2006-01-20 04:00 pm (UTC)What if Fannypack had come through before Britney? This seems v. optimistic to me but it's a lovely thought.
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Date: 2006-01-20 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 04:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 04:12 pm (UTC)where did the piano riff for 'Wannabe' come from? ragtime blues/jazz? the bassline and guitar twangs seems lifted from 70s funk (O'Jays etc.) which makes sense. 'Say You'll Be There' has that Stevie Wonder vibe with the harmonica solo. Going for a big orchestral ballad after that was a pretty impressive branch out at the time, looking back. Take That! never got strings as big as the ones on '2 Become 1' and the likes of Boyz II Men didn't go in for such big production either. Seemed to be only the domain of solo stars at that point (Earth Song etc.). Take That had already touched on disco revivalism with their Manilow and Hartman covers so that paved the way for 'Who Do You Think You Are?' easily enough.
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Date: 2006-01-20 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 04:35 pm (UTC)IN MY SOLOMONIC JUDGEMENT...
Date: 2006-01-20 04:41 pm (UTC)"levels all over the place" in a bad way = LEX IS AN ROCKIST
Re: IN MY SOLOMONIC JUDGEMENT...
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Date: 2006-01-20 04:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 11:32 pm (UTC)