Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
TEN YEARS ago this week, a single called Wannabe crash-landed at the top of the British charts.
It was a pearling record, full of brio, swagger and the addictive little elements that kicked off with its first line — “I’ll tell you what I want/what I really, really want” — and peaked with the mysterious claim that what its authors were after was a “zig-a-zig-ah”. Within six months, the inescapable Spice Girls were the subject of features in titles as diverse as NME and the Spectator, where they expounded the new theory of “girl power”, summed up thus: “It’s about equality and fun and trying to rule your life.”
When more academic voices weighed in, however, the Girls were found wanting. In the view of the American feminist Jennifer Pozner, it was “probably a fair assumption to say that a zig-a-zig-ah’ is not Spice shorthand for subvert the dominant paradigm’.” Here, it was alleged, was post-feminism revealed as a busted flush: five supposedly empowered starlets whose diminutive nicknames and push-up bras suggested patriarchal business as usual. Extending the logic of that argument, you might even charge them with responsibility for the wave of raunch culture.
Compare them to the pop people who followed in their wake, and the sense of some almost accidental burst of joyous non-conformity gets even greater. If the non-guitar end of the pop market now seems to be dominated by vacuous drones, the Spices — not least when they fired their manager Simon Fuller in 1997, an act of quite splendid self-sabotage — looked like something close to anarchists.
Writing this, I came across a copy of Germaine Greer’s The Whole Woman, published in 1999, when Spice hegemony was fading fast. “The Spice Girls did make a difference,” she wrote, “because their most passionate fans were eight-year-old girls.”
If those fans were eight then, they’ll be coming up to 18 now. The great minds behind the lads’ mags Zoo and Nuts might want to take note: maybe — just maybe — something slightly more interesting might be around the corner.
· John Harris
