(#580: 15 November 1997, 2 weeks; 13 December 1997, 1 week)
Track listing: Spice Up Your Life/Stop/Too Much/Saturday Night Divas/Never Give Up On The Good Times/Move Over/Do It/Denying/Viva Forever/The Lady Is A Vamp
(Author's Note: This blog entry was written by Lena, and edited, formatted and published by me. - M.C.)
"I was the sergeant major, I was the parent, I ran everything. I was very controlling and I think that builds up some resentment. They were probably unhappy because they were missing their parents, missing their loved ones, they were tired, emotionally drained and I was probably the one responsible for that so we parted company."
(Simon Fuller, interview in The Guardian, 14 January 2014)
"The general separation of worker and product tends to eliminate any direct personal communication between the producers and any comprehensive sense of what they are producing. With the increasing accumulation of separate products and the increasing concentration of the productive process, communication and comprehension are monopolized by the managers of the system. The triumph of this separation-based economic system proletarianizes the whole world."
(Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, pg. 9)
There are some days when I lament, if only to myself, how slow I was to pick up on things and generally be aware of them in the 1990s. By 1997 I was aware of the Spice Girls but not, particularly, involved. They were clearly for girls and women younger than me, I thought – but hmm, was I missing out on something? Was my not-very-enjoyable-so-far 1997 blinding me to all the FUN I could be having listening to this album and going to see the accompanying (sort of) movie? Were Gwyneth Paltrow and Winona Ryder smarter and cooler than me in being fans? Time passed; they were on the cover of US Vogue in January 1998. Ah, 1998, when I could feel things were going to change, when things were going to get…better? Somehow. But that did not include gravitating to the Spice Girls or their world.
So I come to this album thinking, well, maybe it’s good? And as I have a cold I think, maybe this will give me energy and even cheer me up. OH DEAR. Together with the movie (which I have seen) I felt as if I was hurled headfirst into a pub where a wake has just happened, being heckled and yelled at by a hen party who are wondering why am I not having nearly as good a time as they, all alpha girls dressed up for a party, are. The you-go-girl energy isn’t mine; the ‘I can top your story, whatever it is, with my story’ energy certainly isn’t mine; they are all, to an extent, drama queens of one sort or another. The Park End Club crowd, if you’re from around Oxford way, spilling out at one or two in the morning…
I am sad to report, dear reader, that Spiceworld and indeed the Spice World movie were things that did not, after all this time, give me much pleasure. I kept feeling that all the specialness has been rubbed off, something has been lost and what is left is, as Debord kind of puts it, impersonal communication. The movie was made first, and the girls are all trained in acting and being the Spice Girls already, but….they also had to finish the album after making the movie, with the album definitely suffering by result. Only a few songs are in the movie, and the ‘um, there’s something a bit wrong here’ vibes begin quite early on, when they are on TOTP doing “Too Much” (starting a movie with a slow song isn’t a good idea) and then for some random reason they fly to Milan (the whole plot is them supposedly getting ready to perform for a huge audience at the Royal Albert Hall). This is where I realized the movie was placing the Spice Girls into the hellhole of British (really, English) Light Entertainment.
There they are in Milan doing some performance of a song by Gary Glitter (who was there with them in the movie - quickly removed afterwards as he'd been charged about two weeks after filming ended) and then, SIGH, they kept the song in the movie. When Posh complained about the nearly naked men gyrating behind them during the rehearsal, I thought, that’s the least of your problems. Unless the whole movie is…supposed to make them tacky. Ordinary, boring, passé even. When they all walk out on their horrible (but he loves them!) manager, they all come back a moment later, HA HA it was just a joke. They were never angry. The whole subplot about their very pregnant friend and all of them being there for her giving birth (in the most technology-free birthing suite I have ever seen) is just there to show they are people, somehow. Girls sticking together no matter what.
But it hit me that this is a movie where a camp Chief (Roger Moore, clearly enjoying his role more than anyone else) tells the Manager what to do, the Chief is unseen by the girls and so they have no idea he exists. They have no agency, no rights, no real life except for when they are in the hospital, and yet they are all about….girl power? WHAT? I am trying to see what power these girls have and beyond going on the Thames to sing “My Boy Lollipop” with a couple of girls who won a contest, there’s…nothing?
Nothing?
The whole experience is very telling. "Spice Up Your Life", "Do It", "Move Over", "Never Give Up On The Good Times", "Saturday Night Divas" - these all sound like ideas (or rather, esp. with "Move Over," commercials) rather than any girl power messages. They are not telling you what to do, just to do something; "Move Over" is all about 'Generation Next' (they did a whole concert in Istanbul based on this song/idea). "Never Give Up On The Good Times" has, coughs, A FLUTE SOLO and sounds like it was cribbed from at least one if not two 80s songs, mainly George Benson’s “Never Give Up On A Good Thing.” There is no punctum here, no 'oh wow, actual feeling'. The songs drag along listlessly, with any actual emotions coming along almost by accident...
'
...which brings me to the complete awkwardness of the timing of all this. Very early on in the movie the girls bump into Elton John, the unwitting trauma figure of 1997 - grieving for Gianni Versace and being comforted by Diana, then helping a nation to grieve for her just two months later. He mentions both in the original version, but by the movie's edit he's practically speechless, looking more confounded by meeting the girls than anything else. Rolling around London constantly in what I guess is the 'Spice Bus' (totally Union Jack painted of course, with a peace sign on top of that on the back) they pass Buckingham Palace, where they hope the young princes will notice them and be cheered up by them, Elizabeth too. Everything and everyone is dragged into the Light Entertainment nightmare, so much so that if Arthur "Where's Me Washboard??" Atkinson showed up at the Royal Albert Hall as a busker or something, it could not have gotten worse. But no, there's a bomb attached to the Spice Bus? Placed by an evil photographer at the behest of a newspaper editor? There is a very fine line here that keeps being erased, ignored, until everything being wacky and ironic and knowing becomes just...a mess, and a mean one too. The girls turn up on time, do their gig, everyone's ecstatic and at the very end they all...turn to the camera and comment on the audience, and then the bomb goes off...
I cannot help but feel this was all a way of telling the Spice Girls they had just gone too far. They were pushed to do all this at once (the best song on the album, "Stop," is about their wanting things to slow down, but done in a cheery, compliant way - it's not punk rock). It was all supposed to be...what's that...a show? "The Lady Is A Vamp" is a dreadful ending to the album (and it directly refers to and is used a section where they all play dress-up as the stars from previous eras, models, actresses). It is so bad it reminded me of Rattle And Hum, particularly in name-dropping A Love Supreme. The not-so-modest upshot is that THEY are the stars of today, the '90s, all of that was in the past but they are NOW....
...a now that has a metaphorical bomb ticking away. No doubt the whole thing must have been seen - album and movie - as a way to cheer people up after such a dreadful end-of-summer, after the shock and death and grief. You know, like the Beatles after JFK died. Hmm. It was not the same reaction. Spiceworld only topped the charts for three weeks, a bit pitiful for a band that was claiming that the whole world loved them. Or maybe some people would say that this all happened at the wrong time, that if it had come out in, say, some point in 1998 then they would have had a better time of it.
But 1997 was not a year for waiting, and Simon Fuller was going to get as much out of the girls as humanly possible, like a farmer maximizing the yield of his crops while he still can. My perception of 1997 - that it seemed to drag on forever, then something happened and the late '90s began and everything seemed to speed up - also plays a part.** The Spice Girls fired Simon Fuller in early November but that still was not enough to take the pressure off, even though they were then left to managing themselves.
Ginger Spice, Geri, left the Spice Girls in the late May of 1998. There are various ideas as to why she did it, but one modest idea I have is that she broke down because of bad faith. Running around the world talking about girl power while being controlled by a man is a contradiction that is very hard to bear. The decade was ending - or at least at this point the end is getting closer all the time - and this fact means people will break down, change, leave, throw things away, convert, join cults...or leave situations because everything is piling up and unless they do something, nothing is going to change. When you are feeling like a cartoon character in a huge machine working you night and day on a movie set, a recording studio and then on tour, dealing with eating disorders and depression, it is no mystery why she left.
The unfortunate thing was Geri was their punctum and with that gone…when they made their last album it wasn’t a big hit (it will not be troubling us here). The Spice Girls eventually got together again for a reunion tour in 2007, and again for the closing ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics*** And then the deluge of music-star-producing tv competitons began, an absolute hotbed of Light Entertainment which found many more women and girl groups to take (more or less) the Spice Girls' place in the new century (this includes Girls Aloud, who were the winners of 2002's Popstars: The Rivals part of the Popstars Christmas special, where they did "Winter Wonderland" in a perfunctory way alongside One True Voice, their boyband counterpart, because contracts). Other women who became famous from TV at this time: actress Martine McCutcheon and cruise ship singer Jane McDonald (I should note the first series of Popstars gave the world Hear'Say and Liberty X, which I am not including as they weren't strictly girl groups).
The Spice Girls deserved better. I realize for many girls - actual pre-teens - they were the biggest thing in the world, their own personal cheerleading team, with their own pizza and body spray and who knows what else besides. But notice how if it's them vs. what is left of Britpop (or more generally, British rock) then they have been left behind and weirdly they have stayed 'behind' in a way that is sad. Take That got back together in the '00s and did very well (there is, according to Mark Sinker who wrote about the Spice World movie for Sight And Sound, a joke about Gary Barlow but the movie is so relentlessly non-stop I missed it). They did well because their new material reflected their maturity and it wasn't just Gary writing the songs.
Whereas the Spice Girls, though older, never really changed or grew up. I do not know if this is their own choice or is something mixed up with sexism; or more likely, the girls who loved them grew up and look fondly back at them, but are content to listen to today's music instead.****
There is one scene in the movie which is rather poignant - they are remembering hanging out in a modest cafe where the chef (played by Bill Paterson) knows them, and they put their boombox on and dance and sing along to "Wannabe." It is genuinely the best scene as it brings back who they once were - rebellious, vivid, improv pop. He thinks the song is okay, but still wants something a bit more jazz. Well, she's only fourteen but young Amy Winehouse is out there learning about stage work and jazz. And a little girl named Rachel Agatha Keen is born in October 1997 and grows up to continue the audacity and intensity of the best of the Spice Girls and Amy. We know her as RAYE.
Coming up: ugh, there's subjectivity, no, it's not real!
*The script of the movie was written by the brother of their manager, Kim Fuller. I wish I could say I was making this up.
**By contrast I only remember the spring of 1998, then suddenly it's late October and something - at this point I don't know what it is - happens and I am unaccountably happy. I will explain this later....
***How many people watched this and squirmed when they saw David Cameron and Boris Johnson dancing to the Spice Girls? MY EYES.
****I cannot imagine the whole dynamic pricing for tickets scenario for the Spice Girls as opposed to, oh, Oasis. There is probably a lesson here.
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