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It was a power trip
by Caitlin Moran

Ten years after the release of the first Spice Girls album, our writer argues that the social legacy of 'girl power' is still with us


In the calendar of popular culture, anniversaries can often surprise and alarm. Learn that it’s 15 years since Madonna released Vogue, say, and I can’t be the only one who would react by smiting their brow and exclaiming: “Fifteen years ago! But I am only 18! Surely I can’t remember things that happened when I was merely 3!� Even though I seem to remember that, when it came out, I danced to it in a nightclub, while smoking a fag.

Of course, it also works in reverse. On finding that Big Brother started as recently as 2000, many may feel obversely inclined to clutch their temples and roar: “It’s only been in my life since 2000!?! Surely I have been watching receptionists-cum-glamour models, and ‘wacky’ boys with shiny heads, cavorting around in a gay-glo penguin-pen since the day I was born! It can’t only have started in 2000! I distinctly remember Princess Diana saying she was a big fan. She wanted Nush to win!� However, on hearing that this week marks the tenth anniversary of the release of Wannabe, and the subsequent launch of the Spice Girls’ supertanker career, there is no time-perception discrepancy.


Yes, it feels exactly like ten years since the Spice Girls first popped up. I have a sense of neither one more, nor one less, day of the post-Spice world. I feel I have experienced every hour of SpiceMania — the clompy shoes, the Baby clones, Geri’s V-signs, pinching Prince Charles’s bum, Nelson Mandela, the Union Jack dress, the movie. I also feel I have experienced every hour of subsequent Spice Failure — Geri leaving, the remaining girls being booed at a Spanish awards ceremony, the increasingly weak singles, the failed relationships, the weight problems, the ludicrously named children and the unsuccessful solo careers. Yes, a decade seems exactly right.

Now a Greatest Hits album is on the way, with one new song attached to promote it, and there are rumours of a Spice Reunion, for Children In Need. This, then, surely, is pop legacy assessment time. But is there, in fact, a Spice Girls pop legacy to assess at all? Looking at the charts today and considering another anniversary — ten years since the release of Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill — one can see spawning teams of Alanis’s musical offspring in the charts: KT Tunstall, Sandi Thom, Jem, Avril Lavigne, Ashlee Simpson, Dido and Pink. Similarly, last year’s big Britpop anniversary — ten years since Blur v Oasis in the singles charts — has spawned the Kaiser Chiefs, Kasabian, Lily Allen, Razorlight, Bloc Party. Eleven years since Radiohead’s The Bends, and it’s apparent that Coldplay, Keane, Muse and Snow Patrol have taken the baton of indie power-balladeering and run.

But — perhaps surprisingly for an act that sold 55 million records — the Spice Girls blueprint is not something that has been enthusiastically taken up by the next generation of pop stars. If one considers what the basic Spice package was — a girl-group with a bit of balls and 12-certificate burlesque — then their current legacy, ten years on, is the Sugababes and Girls Aloud.

Previous Spice-inspired groups — All Saints, B*witched, Honeyz, Atomic Kitten, the Cheeky Girls, Cleopatra, Dream — all bit the dirt a long time ago, and most of them without much consequence. For something that was at one time one of Britain’s biggest exports, this is a fairly pitiful brood of offspring.

The truth is that the Spice Girls brought very little of any serious use to the music industry. The truism at the time was that their success disproved a hitherto golden rule: girl-groups don’t sell. Girls don’t buy records by girls. That there would never be a female That That — Take t*** — or girl Boyzone — Boysovum. Obviously, when the Spice Girls then not only outsold Boyzone and Take That, but also broke the US — which neither Take That nor Boyzone ever managed — it was widely considered to be a new era for manufactured pop. Imagine! Bands with girls in! Even more popular than boys! The industry could double its product range at a stroke! Of course, in the event, it turned out that the golden rule actually was still a golden rule. Since the Spice Girls, there has been no other female Take That, or Boyzone. Girls still don’t, by and large, buy records by girls. While Girls Aloud have produced an unbroken run of the 21st century’s greatest pop songs, they are considered, in sales terms, to have been a relative failure. Likewise, the Sugababes’ next tour includes dates at The Quarry, Shrewsbury, and the Corn Exchange, Edinburgh — not quite the Wembley Stadiums that their managers must dream of.

No — the Spice Girls’ legacy is more insidious than producing a string of blockbuster pop daughters. It is woven into popular culture, flashing through in unexpected places, or underpinning seemingly disconnected trends. Let us consider Generation Spice — girls who were 8, the median age of Spice Girls fans, when Wannabe was released, and this year attaining their majority. Extraordinarily enough, for them, the main success has not been the string of decade-defining Top Ten singles, but the half-arsed Girl Power. Not so much a political manifesto, more a dress-code and something to shout (“girl power!�) when momentarily disarmed by the sight of a spider, Girl Power is, extraordinarily, still very much with us. As one would expect from an idea whose proponents were pop stars, rather than philosophers or essayists, Girl Power was ill-defined enough to be amalgamated into other ideas about feminity that were abroad at the time — primarily, the concept of the “ladette� — and left us with the recognisable template of young British womanhood today: loud, insecure, materialistic, interested in being famous but not quite sure how or why, “spiritual�, but only if it’s something low-maintenance, such as Wicca or crystal-healing — the Spice Girls’ girls are Nikki from Big Brother, every other woman who has been on Big Brother, Paris Hilton, Jodie Marsh, the WAGs, and, by and large, the Spice Girls themselves.

If Girl Power could be said to be one thing, it is the trick of saying that you believe in something, but then doing something completely opposite. You are concerned about “The Planet�, but continue to buy cheap, disposable fashion items, and fly frequently. You engage in faddy diets, holistic therapies and vitamin supplements — but continue to smoke and binge-drink. You say that men are your friends and equals — but date “ bad� men with appalling reputations, or stay in relationships in which your partner is regularly accused of being unfaithful. You believe that friends are the most important thing — friendship never ends! — but continually bicker and fight with each other, and cannot work with each other. You dress sexily “for yourself� — but never quite explain how often you mooch around the house in kabuki make-up, a crotch-skimming dress and silver stack-heeled boots, feeling quietly sensual.

Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs does, perhaps, distil the final result of Girl Power — the sense that the only real social and employment opportunities that it opened up were for young, attractive women to act as their own pimps.

Of course, this makes it sound as if the Spice Girls were an all-out terrible idea, which, let us remind ourselves, they were not. Their other cultural legacy was, perhaps, even more powerful: propelling the discovery of the “tweenager� market — pre-teen children with an appetite for the more colourful and immediate aspects of adult culture. These tweenies started with the Spice Girls, strappy vest-tops and cherry lip-gloss, and moved effortlessly on through mobile phones, ringtones, EastEnders, Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me out of Here! and Friends — all of which consistently register as children’s favourite programmes, at the expense of programmes specifically made for children, such as Tracy Beaker or Blue Peter.

Similarly, as adults got “ironically� into the Spice Girls — “Who’s your favourite Spice?� — it opened up children’s culture to adults, giving British voters Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, CD:UK, grown women in Claire’s Accessories and grown men crying over Doctor Who.

Post-Spice, there has been a perceptible axis shift in popular culture — the creation of a middle ground where the generations can converge on communal pleasures, arguably for the first time since the Generation Gap was invented in the Sixties.

As with most pop culture memorabilia, however, it is the small, silly things that often affect the most, when the time comes to reflect on circumstances of their creation. The way that, post-Spice, instances of teenage girls singing harmonies on the top decks of buses rocketed; how the Spices left women unafraid of having gigantic, badger-like highlights in their hair; the admirably consistent and resolute way that the British public have said “ no� to Geri Halliwell since 2001.

The Spice Girls were popcorn, a fairground ride, a dizzy spell, a comic. Don’t look for echoes of their memory in the charts — you won’t really find them. But wherever there is a hen night out of control, a ten-year-old on a pink mobile or a chartered surveyor settling down to watch Shrek, that is where the Spice Girls live on.