Too Much?
Scary, Sporty, Ginger, Baby, and Posh. Alone they're just adjectives, but together, they make people cringe, cry, and scream. If you haven't heard of the Spice Girls, you've obviously been living in a cave for a little over a year. My first encounter with them was the "Wannabe" video. I thought they were a little silly, but the song was catchy. I bought the single, and I played it intermittently. Then I heard "Say You'll Be There" and figured the Spice Girls were a group I might enjoy.
That's when the media insanity started. Every time I turned on my television, there they were, shouting Girl Power and dancing in really strange shoes. I couldn't turn around without seeing something else about the Spices. I couldn't turn on my radio without hearing them, and it was getting old fast. Finally, when I thought I could get no more disgusted with their presence, I saw the trailer for Spice World.
It was bad enough that they were taking over the radio station and MTV, but now they were going to take over the movie theater. Then the video for "Spice Up Your Life" was released. This vision of a futuristic society, where Spice ruled the globe, was terrifying. I thought I could take no more, and was prepared to use my CD as a frisbee if I heard Girl Power one more time. They became a punchline for a thousand jokes, and rupe for the medie "backlash."
Then one night, I was seraching for some form of entertainment on cable when I discovered a special about their movie. Since nothing else was on, I decided to keep count of the number of times Geri mentioned Girl Power. Then they showed a ten minute montage of clips from Spice World. I laughed. The scene where they dance around acting like each other was almost like a Saturday Night Live sketch-an older one, back when they were funny. I decided then and there that I wanted to see this movie. I watched a few specials, and I realized: the Spice Girls are funny. Not fun to make fun of, but funny themselves.
I went to see Spice World about a week after it opened. I had read that it was a "clever comedy" and "a poor man's Spinal Tap." Classmates have told me the movie was just a big Beatles' rip-off, but I had to see for myself. I thought it was really funny. It amazed me that this was actually the Spice Girls. The entire movie was a spoof of them, the media, and the public. People who hate the Spice Girls would enjoy the self-depreciating humor. They conformed to their stereotypes at every possible moment (Baby Spice has a lollipop at all times, and Posh never takes off her spiked heels) and even pick fun at temselves about it. The Spice Girls seem to possess the rar ability to laugh at themselves, and they make me laugh with them. Did you know their nicknames actually came from a disrepectful article in a British magazine? They liked them and adopted them as their own. They make jokes about what they will be like in a few years in the form of a flash-forward that their enemies would love.
The Spice Girls realize the world is going to get sick of them, and they know that people make fun of them. But the fact is, it isn't their fault. Think about it, do they really cal up the radio stations and tell them to play "Two Become one" every other hour? Or maybe they asked MTV to play the video to "Say You'll Be There" every day at the same time. They became popular quickly, just like a million other bands. The radio stations began to play them over and over, just like everything else. The media decided that since they were the band-of-the-hour, they would report on their every action until they found something else to talk about. It's very easy to get too much of something, and too much Spice Girls was even easier. They could have fallen the way of Hootie and The Blowfish or Ace of Base, but instead of resisting the backlash of the fickle public, they addressed it head-on with a movie. Instead of falling to the wayside, they kept going until they made it through the backlash and people are realizing that the Spice Girls weren't that bad.
Now that I don't hear it every day, I do enjoy their music. "Spice Up Your Life" is a pretty fun song, and "Too Much" (their latest release) is good as well. Their music isn't for everybody, and neither are their personalities. But you don't get five hit singles, two hit albums, dozens of awards, AND a hit movie without appealing to somebody.
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