Tuesday, June 2, 1998
Spice Girl breakup creates void not likely to be filled for
minutes
FILM: British group will be missed by many devoted, deranged
fans
This just in: A reliable source – also known as a design intern
with a British accent – tells us the Spice Girls have broken up.
Divisions within the group (perhaps about whose platforms were the
spiciest or who would be the last to pose for Playboy) eventually
prompted Ginger to bid her fellow crooners farewell.
Posh, I could see. That girl was just asking for trouble – the
way she danced and sang and tried to act all cool and stuff. Yeah,
Posh with her Adidas shoes and her sassy ponytail. Oh wait, that
was Sporty. I get it now. Her clothes were athletic – Sporty and
Sheryl Swoopes, out there crusading for girl power.
So it could have been Sporty sabotaging the fab five. Or maybe
it was Scary. I mean, can you really trust anyone with big hair? Or
even Baby. Can you really trust anyone with pigtails?
But Ginger! Ginger, we loved you. The way you danced and sang
and acted all cool and stuff. The way your hair was, like, red. You
were a glimpse into the future of music, or so we hoped.
But, in the footsteps of John Lennon, James Dean, River Phoenix
and others cut down so tragically in their prime, the Spice Girls
are bound to make entertainment history. OK, so no one died, but
why should we let that take away from the drama, the humanity of it
all? And we hope our humble pages will be the first to honor their
legacy.
Any whiny nay-sayers, wallowing in their own garage-band, indie,
"integrity"-laden filth, who suggest that the Spice Girls have not
left a legacy need only to look at the facts of their expansive if
brief career.
First, the Spice Girls are artists. The latter half of the
decade ushered in the first of many hit singles, That Ziggy-Ziggy
Ha-Ha Song. Determined to be anything but one-hit wonders, they
quickly followed with That Slow Song and That Song They Played on
the Radio A Lot. Their sound was like no other. The way they all
sang at the same time, then how, sometimes, just one or two of them
would sing – it moved millions to tears.
And speaking of the millions – no, billions – who finally felt
comfortable letting their own inner spiciness shine through, let’s
not ignore the Spice Girls as cultural icons. They showed us, once
and for all, that skinny attractive people can be successful too.
(There was talk, however, of Ginger beefing up to a size 7. That
may explain a lot).
Many little girls have lain awake at night, lamenting that they
can never inhabit Barbie’s Pepto Bismol pink fantasy land. Barbie,
after all, is a doctor, astronaut, aerobics instructor, teacher,
ice skater and the world’s most understanding girlfriend (she’s
been with Ken since the ’60s despite his plastic underwear issues).
But we can’t all live up to such unrealistic ideals.
Enter the Spice Girls. They shed some reality on the situation,
offering their mini-skirted selves up as positive role models for
the talent-challenged.
Just because you can’t sing, per se, or even dress yourself
without the help of a publicist, doesn’t mean you don’t deserve
your own line of nail polish and your face in the window of every
Aahs franchise from here to Liverpool.
Girl Power took the world by storm. They claimed Margaret
Thatcher as their role model and, well, that pretty much manifests
itself in every poetic, highly articulate, socially conscious
lyric. The fab feminists showed us that girls can wear big clunky
shoes and make scary growly faces, just like boys. Who needs law
school?
The Spice Girls also brought their international flair to our
own American cultural wasteland. Finally we saw the merit in their
crazy foreign ways.
We stopped being so prejudiced toward our neighbors across the
Atlantic, who until now had only brought us The Beatles, Monty
Python and our current system of government.
And of course they’re totally multi-cultural. There’s that kind
of black Spice and then there’s, well … Sporty/Posh has really
dark hair.
And all their songs about, like, love and stuff. Pretty powerful
message about anti-racism, don’t you think?
Yes, the Spice Girls made us all wanna don a pair of go-go boots
and sing along to their words of wisdom.
No other all-girl, advertisement-recruited, kissy-faced, British
pop group of the late 1990s has done more.
Klein is a third-year American literature and culture student
who was recruited to write this column with very little warning or
even having listened to the radio in the past year. Can you
tell?
Cheryl Klein