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It's a strange scene. The Spice Girls have been in town
now for almost a week and the
hype machine is in full swing. Today, it's Thursday and the singers-dancers
are doing a
run-through for Saturday Night Live. Robert De Niro, is also appearing
on the show, is
here. Melanie Brown, between skits, heads off toward De Niro and utters
a word or two
that has become part of the group's trademark. "I waaaanna meet you,"
she says, and
the rest of the conversation is a burst of words. Seconds later, a slightly
bewildered De
Niro is dragged into the dressing room with "the girls." After
a brief interval. De Niro is
playfully pushed out of the dressing room.
"They're total fans," is the way one staffer with
the label on hand puts in. "Just because
you're famous doesn't mean you stop becoming fans - of other people."
The Spice Girls, whether you call them a musical phenomenon
or a cultural phenomenon,
are infuriating many people and inebriating others. Geri Halliwell, Melanie
Brown,
Emma Bunton, Victoria Adams, and Melanie Chisholm have hit it big. In
a decade where
an actor has been president, they make perfect sense: They're not a band,
they just play
one on TV. Or rather... they're just a singing group: Studio musicians
play, while they sing.
They have, at least, burst the bubble of "Brit boy bands" and
become, for better or worse,
a pop rock phenomenon around the world - and now here in New York.
"It's a contrived studio thing," a writer for
magazines including Alternative Press, Wired,
and MTV On Line says. "They're not real. They're not serious."
Whether it's sex or sound, the music is "shifting units"
in New York and nationally and
now the group's turning up in the New York nightly news, talk shows (a
circuit that helped
make them famous in England) and street conversation. Globally they've
hit number one
in around 30 nations from Latvia to Latin America. The Gavin Report said
"Wannabe"
was the most added track for their first tally of this year, outdistancing
Madonna, Sheryl
Crow, and others. It went to the number one spot on Billboard's Hot 100
pop singles chart,
selling over 1 million copies in five weeks in the United States. And
"Spice" was the
highest debuting album of the week, hitting the Billboard album chart
at number six.
"How can we get burned out?" Melanie Chisholm
asks. "We've only been going a year."
They hit the scene at the time when the music industry was
finding out that girl groups
can sell albums. Grunge was in the middle of a backlash: Maybe it's not
coincidence that
as Soundgarden split up, the Spice Girls were on the rise. Other labels
took on
"girl bands" such as Lucious Jackson. Gwen Stefani and "No
Doubt" sang about a girl's
world. And Virgin found itself with a roster of the Chemical Brothers,
Iggy Pop, Meatload,
Dreadzone and Massive Attack - along with Nenah Cherry. Then came the
Spice Girls
with their feverishly faux feminism: "It's a Girl's World,"
"Future is Female,"
"Wonderwoman" are scraweld across the CD liners. And yet, if
they were critcized for
being model-like, even their appearance was more about
attitude than aesthetics.
"None of us are conventional beauties," Geri Halliwell
(Ginger Spice in some incarnations)
says. "That's inspiring girls, because it shows you don't have to
be gorgeous to be up there
doing it."
Of course, their success shows pretty much the opposite:
It's the marketing, stupid, not just
the music. There's a grand tradition of pre-fab bands from the Monkees
to the Archies (who
had a hit with "Sugar, Sugar") to the Sex Pistols. They were,
critics said, manipulated.
"They've begun to get very greedy," says one British
photographer "They make believe
they're bigger than they are. Who do they think they are, the Beatles?"
Exactly who do they think they are? A perpetual photo op,
they are, still, personalities at
a time when many music groups seem dangerously...well, bland.
"We want to bring some of the glamour back to pop,
like Madonna had when we were
growing up," Geri Halliwell says. "We want to be relevant to
girls our age."
Well... roughly their age. Give or take a few years. The
Spice Girls lied about their age -
saying that Emma Bunton was a teenager - and then owning up to it. There's
a definite
bubble around the band.
"The idea of girl power is," Emma says, "...important
to us."
But doubt reigns in the halls of record companies before
they arrive for the Saturday
Night Live gig. There's talk: Is it the rise or ruse of the Spice Girls?
"It's the female version of New Kids on the Block,
a manufactured group. They're
Milli Vanilli," echoes one man working in the music industry. "The
question is do they
really know how to sing?"
The group says again and again that they write the songs.
They say investigaton, and
dunning, is part of the game.
"We put ourselves in this position," Melanie Chisholm
says. "We're prepared to take the
flak that comes with it."
So exactly who are the Spice Girls? On the one hand, they
are pop's Pygmalions, women
(They're in their 20s) whom Prof. Henry Higgens would grab and drag into
pronounciation
class. Victoria, the wealthiest, was dubbed "Posh Spice" and
nicknames followed for all.
Those seem like a stroke of marketing genius: Actually, they started when
a writer at Top
of the Pops magazine came up with the name "Scary Spice;" the
rest of the spice rack
followed.
"My mum went, 'You're not scary,' is the way Melanie
Brown puts it. "I said, 'Yes I am.'"
The Spice Girls, before they had become Spice Girls (It
has a slight shade of "Bond Girls"
doens't it?) a few years ago, were working, in London as models, dancers,
and actresses.
There's a lot of talk about an ad that appeared in a local publication
to recruit a girl group.
Some people question whether the ad is part of a corporate creation myth.
"Many have questioned the truth of a rags-to-riches
tale," Mike Flaherty wrote in
Entertainment Weekly, "so serendipitous it makes the Monkees look
like modern-day
Horatio Algers."
Actually, it seems to have run in May 1994 in The Stage,
an acting trade paper,
searching for "an all-female act for a record deal." The identity
of the person who
placed the ad has, for the most part, been a mystery. But according to
Steve Dougherty,
a journalist, he found them. Chris and Bob Herbert, he says, ran the ad
looking for
"streetwise, outgoing, ambitious singers." The women who became
the Spice Girls
were chosen from around 400 people and began rehearsing and living in
a house
rented for them by the Herberts in Maidenhead outside of London.
"Legal reasons," Melanie Chisholm says of her
refusal to name names.
Still, success didn't come until Simon Fuller (whose clients
include Annie Lennox) took
them on his 19 Management. Things started happening and they were signed
by Virgin.
They lip synched a major performance for the Brit Pop awards
ceremony. The rumor
mill went into overdrive. When Oasis attended the Capital FM Music Awards
in London,
Noel from that band asked when the Spice Girls would do a gig as he picked
up his
award for best concert of the year. Was this Milli Vanilli all over again?
The Saturday
Night Live show would be the answer.
"They're writing it themselves," Carl Publishing's
Steve Schragis boasts.
"Each one is writing a section."
He's talking about their book: It sounds similar to the
chant that they had written songs
with their producers. Richard Stanard and Matt Rowe play the music. And
Paul Wildon
and Andy Watkins (who produced music by Al Green, Lisa Stansfield, and
Mica Paris)
produced the CD. But the band became a kind of icon: image and music.
"We...set up securtiy patrols to guard some of the
sites in case fans try to steal the
posters," a Channel 5 spokesperson says of the London posters. "Heaven
knows what
they would do with them. They're a bit big to put on a bedroom wall."
But what about the band? They arrive early in New York,
staying at the Four Seasons
Hotel, before Saturday Night Live show - rehearsing at first in a separate
studio. They
sing "Happy Birthday" at a book signing - and as one guest on
the show insists, they
do sind their hits for the show - not to tape.
"It's their first live performance with a band,"
says a jubilant label staffer.
"And it sounded brilliant."
The Spice Girls survived Saturday, which, unbelievably,
was their first (and so far only)
show in the United States. Their first big show is slated for Istanbul
in October. Tickets,
the story is, will be free to people who buy cans of Pepsi in June - outside
the U.S.
The band is giving away a new single in a tie-in.
"Because we're giving it away," Simon Fuller,
the band's manager, says,
"we don't think it will be allowed to be included in the charts."
A lot of people have set their clocks to time the Spice
Girls' 15 minutes of fame.
But they've had to reset their watches as the group went beyond one-hit
wonder status.
The clock is ticking, but the 15 minutes are long over. It's 10pm, do
you know where the
Spice Girls are? Probably on you television set and your radio. The bubble
may burst,
but for now it grows bigger almost day by day.
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