This week's target: The Spice Girls.
Well, my life is complete. I have beheld the Spice Girls.
They appeared last night on David Letterman, right after Kenneth Branagh. Talk about your studies in contrast. Now, I have seen two Spice Girl videos, and from them had the impression that they were sorta like the Bangles--more package than product, but pleasant to listen to and passably talented. Clearly I have joined the large number of Americans who will believe any kind of whopper as long as it is delivered via the media.
There they all stood--Ginger Spice, Posh Spice, Scary Spice (funnily enough, the only woman of color in this group--whadaya bet they wanted to call her Savage Spice before someone talked them out of it?), Sporty Spice, and Baby Spice. Baby appeared to be standing on about 2 feet worth of platform shoe, which seems to be their way of making them all the same height. Ginger was wearing a royal blue dress that stuck to her like Saran wrap and didn't do much for her; the others all had some kind of jacket-over-extremely-minimal-bustier thing going on. All right, so they're not the first girl group to use T&A to sell tickets. That seems to be the only way girl groups get much of anywhere in the music business. And since the original concept for this band appears to have been "More T&A In One Place Than Any Other Group!", one cannot blame them for wrapping their bodies in this weird laminated plastic type fabric that seems to be their trademark and shaking their little tushes on the catwalk. Personally, I don't think any of them are that attractive, but then I'm not a heterosexual man, am I.
So we watched. The song itself, to be fair to them, was extremely lame, appearing to be a watered-down take on "Freak Out" combined with some anemic and half-assed attempts at hip-hop. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and you can't make "Bohemian Rhapsody" out of "You Light Up My Life." So it was not perhaps their fault that the singing seemed halfhearted and weak, or that Ginger Spice appeared to be too apathetic to even bother lifting the microphone to her pouty lips during one of the choruses. Besides, lots of "artists" sound better in the studio than they do in real life. Madonna, Hansen, Milli Vanilli. So we were willing to spot 'em that.
However. They were not there just to sing. T&A is, evidently, more enticing when in motion than when at rest. Therefore, the Spice Girls also attempted to dance.
Alas.
Had the choreography been successful, it would have been no more complicated than what you could see any group of backup singers doing at any point during the doo-wop era. I'm not exaggerating when I say that every week during the football season, members of the Yale Precision Marching Band--who are by and large a gangly, uncoordinated, nerdly lot--perform dance routines more complex than this during their pre-show warmup. Anyone who has ever watched *Rocky Horror* and executed the Time Warp has mastered the skills required to perform this choreography. How hard can it be to extend one arm, turn to the left, turn to the right, wiggle one's butt, and repeat as necessary?
Too hard for the Spice Girls. It was amazing, really. They were almost never in unison, especially on moves that required displacement of the feet. Baby has some excuse, perched atop her twin towers, but for the others the only reason I can come up with for the sloppy, uncoordinated, half-assed and mistake-ridden routine they executed--at least the only one that wouldn't involve some kind of controlled substance--is that they actually have, not just no talent, but no brains at all. I mean, at the level they were dancing, it's not about physical grace, it's just about concentration. And having some sense of where the downbeat is. Both areas in which they seem to be woefully deficient.
I hear they have a movie coming out. I'm sure the movie will be just fine, since the conglomerate that's shoving this pill down the throats of musiclovers everywhere has no doubt produced the bejeezeus out of it. But if the Spice Girl's corporate backers want their franchise to last, they'd best not organize a Spice Girls world tour. A large group of people who had paid $40 or whatever it is nowadays to see two hours of the sort of crap that was on view for 2 minutes during Dave might well become violent.
But hey, that's all right, because this is the '90s, and bustier feminism is what's happenin' now. Calgon, take me away.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder
Wanna see last week's critique? Go here.
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