Confessions of a Fanboy

“Like I Need a Hole in My Head” was one of the first columns I conceived when I began planning Fanboy. “Like I Need a Hole in My Head,” nicked from a Cracker song, was conceived of because of news like a Spice Girls reunion tour.

This cannot be happening! How can there be an audience for this? Tickets for the 11-city tour — and, wow, I am impressed by your commitment, ladies! — are not going to be cheap. This is going to be a big, tacky, glitzy, high-budget show and people are going to pay through the nose to see and hear this spectacle and it’s a spectacle built on bad music.

“Obviously it’s nostalgic. But equally, if new fans want to come along, that’s fantastic,” reunited Spice Girl Geri Halliwell said. “I like to think our songs are universal and they are timeless.”

I like to think of myself as 80 pounds lighter, six inches taller, and millions of dollars richer. Let’s check the scorecards.

I remember when I first heard of the Spice Girls. I was living in Colorado, working at a music store in a local mall (shocking, innit?) and people were coming in asking for “Wannabe” by Spice Girls. I was pretty sure this was going to be awful but being a good employee I found out when it was going to be released so I could let the customers know. One day, while out on a lunch break, I heard the song for the first time while driving in my car. The first time I heard it, I thought it was a commercial. I kept waiting for it to end, and yet it didn’t. The first time I heard it, I thought the lyrics went something like this:

If you wannabe my lover, first you gotta sleep with my friends,
We’ve got the fever for the flavor of a Pringles

I thought they were selling potato chips. I thought it was a jingle, not a song. I still think I’m right. They were selling something, and it wasn’t music and it wasn’t art. They were selling “Girl Power.” As chunks of my brain were eaten away by the radioactive poison, I found myself thinking, “If that shit is ‘Girl Power,’ you go get me a fuckin’ ‘Rush is Right’ bumper sticker.” It’s rubbish, and it hasn’t aged well. All that has happened in the years since the Spice Girls left is that they left a template for even less talented “Girl” groups to follow — and I’m trying real hard not to look at you, Pussycat Dolls.

So now these sisters of spice are reuniting. Let’s pretend for a second that their songs weren’t awful and they could actually sing. In other words, pretend they’re someone else or imagine yourself in Hell — whichever visual helps.

These women have all had solo careers that have tanked, most of them have gotten married (some divorced) and had kids. Don’t get me wrong here. There are a lot of great looking, beautiful women who have kids flourishing careers. The only reason I raise this trivial issue is because Spice Girls never were getting by on their music. They were selling themselves as objects, they were selling an image. Does anyone think this image is going to look as good as it did back then? They look a little… softer… than before, although in no parallel universe do any of them look fat. They look like they’ve put on a few miles since the last time, although they don’t exactly look old. They simply don’t have that “new car” smell or shine that they did a decade ago. They probably haven’t taken any singing lessons since then, either, and that’s a Scary [Spice] thought.

Filed under: Like I Need A Hole in My Head