The Spice Girls: feminist saviours

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      Just when you finally got "Wannabe" out of your head, the Spice Girls are back, kicking off a worldwide reunion tour on Sunday (December 2) at GM Place. The event is a hot ticket, with a broad spectrum of music fans–pop lovers, self-consciously hip hipsters, and of course, the gays–jostling to get their hands on tickets to see the '90s sensations come together for one last platform-booted kick at the can. Screw the Police reunion–when Posh, Scary, Baby, Sporty, and Ginger Spice hit town, it should be the show of the year, with more camp than a sale at Mountain Equipment Co-op. And yes, I'll admit it: I want a ticket so bad. Can someone please hook a girl up?

      Back in the decadent '90s, when the Spices first took off in the U.K., they were the bane of every self-respecting music fan's existence. Their debut single, complete with ready-made personalities for each of the five girls, was inescapable. The subsequent avalanche of merchandise, movies, and genetically engineered pop music finally grew so powerful that it swept around the world. The five women–Melanie Brown, Emma Bunton, Victoria Adams, Melanie Chisholm, and Geri Halliwell–along with manager/puppetmaster Simon Fuller, became a cultural force, shouting an anemic message of "Girl Power", all the while miming songs they hadn't written in ridiculously oversized platforms.

      At the time, "Girl Power" was more than a little laughable. The five Spice "Girls" were in fact women. Even then, they were garish caricatures, marketed to a young girl's imagination. Into soccer? Meet Sporty. Aspire to being more than Cockney trash? You're going to love Posh. It all seemed so calculated and vulgar, converting living, breathing women into canvases on which to project our notions of female accomplishment.

      Flash forward 11 years, however, and the Spice Girls seem positively radical. Compared to the starlets of today–bitch-slapping each other over Good Charlotte's Joel Madden, fighting with coke addiction, flashing their pubeless cooters to generate press–Ginger's sequined Union Jack hot pants were nothing. The Spice Girls were, in hindsight, paragons of feminist virtue.

      Before you fire off an e-flamer, consider this: the pop starlet of today, with notable exceptions, has no agenda beyond "being famous is fun" and, more dangerously, "be thin and attractive at all costs". It's not just that there's a bad message being sent to young fans–it's that there's no message.

      When was the last time an up-and-coming pop-tart spoke about what it means to be a girl? However calculated the constructs of their stage personalities, the Spices offered young girls an (admittedly limited) range of what womanhood could mean. Although telling a young girl that she can be both sporty and likable seems simple-minded, that's laudable viewed through the lens of today's anti-feminist pop-music landscape.

      There's a valid argument that the '90s offered much better role models for young girls. From Lilith Fair's strummy seriousness to the riot-grrl movement's radical and sometimes absurd take on feminism, there were more intelligent and ideologically sound models of female musicality back in the old days. But in terms of pop, the gateway to the minds of 10-year-old girls, the Spice Girls stand alone. Hell, even their first single demanded that men respect women before a Spice Girl would "be his lover". Cynically contrived by Simon Fuller? Maybe. An ideology likely to stick in the mind of a 10-year-old? You bet your zigazig ah.

      So welcome back, Spice Girls. We're glad to have you, despite the grumbling of rockist killjoys. If you feel like it, stick around because, quite frankly, your gender needs you.

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