The Spice Girls
Two omens of apocalypse: A
few months ago, newspapers in Britain and North America--respectable
newspapers--ran the following headline: "Geri Loses a Nail." Geri was Geri
Halliwell (a k a "Ginger Spice"), one of the five Spice Girls. The nail was a
fingernail.
Last
week, the Spice Girls performed for 27,000 fans in Johannesburg. Nelson Mandela
was there. He said, "These are my heroes. This is one of the greatest moments
of my life."
Even if you're not a pre-adolescent or South Africa's
living saint--and
Slate
's demographic surveys strongly suggest
you're neither--you have probably heard the Spice Girls ("Tell me what you
want, what you really really want"). And you have undoubtedly heard of
the Spice Girls, who are five of the you could ever hope to meet. Their song
"Wannabe" went to No. 1 in more than 30 countries, and their first album,
Spice , has sold 20 million copies, including 5 million in the United
States. Last week's release of the group's new CD, Spiceworld , was the
biggest album launch in British history (though sales were not as brisk as
expected). The album's first single, "Spice Up Your Life," has already
performed a Herculean feat: It knocked Elton John's "Candle in the Wind" off
the top of the British charts. Spiceworld the movie opens worldwide at
the end of the year.
It is hard
to overstate the Spice Girls' influence on popular culture, especially in
Britain. Cabinet ministers the Spice Girls. Tory MPs voted for their favorite
Spice Girl (not surprisingly, Posh Spice won). A British college has proposed
teaching a Spice Girls course. They have spawned a dozen imitation
groups--Spiced Girls, SpicE Girls, Nice 'n' Spicey, Five Spice Girls, among
others--who do nothing but perform Spice Girls songs while wearing Spice Girls
clothes. This is, in short, the Spice Girls moment, the apogee between launch
and crash.
It is the time to cash in. There have, of
course, been plenty of teeny-bopper idols--New Kids on the Block, Take That,
Tiffany, Vanilla Ice, Menudo (Hollywood's byways are littered with their
corpses)--but none has ever been as well marketed as the Spice Girls. They are,
essentially, a poll-tested band. A British promoter picked them from an open
audition based on their looks and spunkiness. None of them is a professional
singer or dancer--unless you count strip-club experience. Only Mel B., who once
played drums, has ever been a professional musician. Their music, too, is
poll-tested. The radio-friendly singles on Spiceworld are watered-down
versions of popular pop genres--disco, funk, world beat, Motown, etc. They are
to pop music what mall food courts are to ethnic food. "Spice Up Your Life,"
for example, is Latin pop, while "The Lady Is a Vamp" is a big-band tune.
But the
music is an afterthought. The Spice Girls represent the Jurassic
Park ification of pop. In the movie industry, spinoff products now account
for a huge percentage of profits. The Spice Girls bring the same spinoff
sensibility to music. Sure, there were Beatles lunch boxes and Michael Jackson
gloves. But they were peripheral to the music. Life is different in Spiceworld.
If there is a product that 12-year-olds use, there will be a Spice Girls
version of it in your mall by Thanksgiving. Look for Spice Girls backpacks,
trading cards, action figures, duvets, perfumes, potato chips, lollipops.
Children will buy Spice Girl-shaped chocolates, Polaroid Spicecams plastered
with Spice Girl stickers, and Spice Girl deodorant--in one of five different
Spice scents. A toy company's stock rose 20 percent when it won the license to
distribute Spice Girl action figures. A clothing store's stock fell 40 percent
when it underestimated the demand for Spice Girl-style outfits.
The high point--or, depending on your view, the low
point--of Spice promotion is the group's Pepsi deal. The Spice Girls wrote a
commercial jingle for Pepsi's "Generation Next" ad campaign. Then they included
the jingle on Spiceworld . You hear the jingle, you buy the album. You
buy the album, you hear the jingle. Pepsi sells more Pepsi. The Spice Girls
sell more Spiceworld . This is what businesspeople call synergy and
musicians call prostitution. Whatever it is, it pays. According to some
estimates, the five girls stand to earn $300 million in the next year.
Critics,
naturally, are appalled. The marketing juggernaut, derivative music, and
moronic lyrics annoy music writers. The Spice Girls, according to reviews, are
"awful" and "extraordinarily untalented." During their rise to fame, the girls
wisely avoided giving concerts; when they finally performed live (on
Saturday Night Live ), critics panned them. They "can neither sing nor
dance."
And yet, the girls are not as bad as all that.
No matter how they are, no matter how pushily they are marketed, the Spice
Girls are truly winning. If Tony Blair's England has a voice, it is
theirs--optimistic, cheerful, arrogant. Along with bands like Hanson, the Spice
Girls have helped vanquish the doleful grunge music that dominated the early
'90s. Spice Girls songs are derivative, but they are also catchy as hell, great
big pink bubbles of chewing-gum pop. The girls themselves are cheeky: Geri
patted Prince Charles on the butt and told him he was sexy (probably the first
time he's heard that). They mock European monetary union and embrace Margaret
Thatcher as "the original Spice Girl." Their self-proclaimed "girl power"
feminism is simple-minded--girl power seems to be the right to wear short
skirts and still be taken seriously--but it's no more dumb than anything
Madonna ever preached.
The most endearing quality
of the Spice Girls is their very crassness. They are products of this ironic,
shrugging age. They are more than happy to sell out and more than happy to make
fun of themselves for doing it. History tells us that the life of the average
pop sensation is a mere 18 months: a meteoric rise to a brief and spectacular
reign, followed by flameout. (Just ask New Kids on the Block. All that remains
of them is Boogie Nights star Mark Wahlberg, a brother of one of
the band members.)
What does this calendar tell
us about the Spice Girls? They arrived in the summer of 1996. So they'll be
gone by this winter--just as soon as the Christmas shopping season is over.
