87. SPICE GIRLS - “Wannabe”
Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Right - now we’re talking. Liking the Spice Girls puts you immediately on the defensive - either you’re a tokenist air-kissing irony boy or your brain really has turned to mulch. No, neither, sorry. Here are some feted 90s recording artistes who have yet to make a record as good as “Wannabe”: Oasis, Radiohead, Beck, Neutral Milk Hotel, All Saints, the Divine Comedy, the (collective not solo) Wu-Tang Clan, Roni Size, Belle And Sebastian, Steps. That the glorious cocktail of sass, contempt, and showbiz that bursts open the opening bars of “Wannabe” is denied by so many purported pop-lovers is a source of as much inchoate rage, frustration, and grief to me as any other act of wanton neglect in pop history. Twelve million bought it? Not enough.
The Spice Girls are manufactured, which is only to say they’re something we own. The saddest sight in celebrityland lately has been Sporty’s welshing on the pop deal, scrabbling to get back some kind of identity of her own. People thought she and Geri were lesbians - “that’s so funny“. The joke’s on her - for as long as the Spice Girls are in the limelight they are whatever you or I want them to be. And what a lot of people wanted them to be was tough, brash, up for a laugh, independent - Girl Power was an ad slogan which got caught in the media-public feedback loop and became real for enough people that it didn’t matter any more than it was a slogan. Unless, of course, you were outside that loop or had made it your business to comment knowingly upon it.
Forget it - arguing the Spice Girls were ‘important’ is as silly and, yes, defensive as saying the reason you should listen to the Stooges is their ‘importance’. You should listen to the girls because they’re brilliant pop music, because the advice “Wannabe” gives you is at base pretty solid, and because when Geri blurts “And as for me, ha-ha, you’ll see”, the record comes together and sounds as hungrily confident of immortality as anything else I’ve ever heard.
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