Four Reasons Why I (Still) Love the Spice Girls

I am an incredible Spice Girls enthusiast and I will openly admit it. 

When I was a kid I just wanted to be Baby Spice. Now, I have red hair and a pierced nose – all in the name of the Spice Girls. The fierceness they had was what made the Girls unique, and while they never claimed to be the best, they were confident. They were the kind of girls you would either want to be or want to be friends with – and perhaps both. 

I will take you back into simpler times, when “zig a zig ah” was a common phrase and give you the story (from A to Z) as to why I still love the Spice Girls. 

Girl Power

While it is easy to knock them for how manufactured they might have been, they still aimed to spread their message of girl power through basically everything that they did. Was it a stunt to attract more female listeners? Maybe. But the Girls managed to do what not many pop groups have done since – they evoked feelings of empowerment to young girls. They were loud, they were crazy, and they were far from the polite PR-groomed pop stars of today. Their overall message was that equality was important and that girls could do whatever boys could do. Considering the pop music market at the time was completely full of boy bands, the Spice Girls managed to be incredibly successful in such a male-dominated market. That in itself is pretty fabulous. 

Lyrics

In a world of pop music that encourages girl hate (ie. Taylor Swift’s Better than Revenge) the Spice Girls encouraged friendship and independence with their lyrics. Their hit “Wannabe” tells the listener, straight up, that if you “wannabe (their) lover,” that you must “get with (their) friends,” so you have to get along with their friends. Another personal favourite, “Do It,” provides some strong girl power. Lyrics such as “remember things like you should be seen / and never heard / give a little respect to me / and it will be returned,” give female listeners serious badass notions of what it means to demand respect. Safe sex is another topic that is approached in the less flamboyant lyrics of “2 Become 1,” but for a pop girl group that was targeted to teenagers and young adults in the 1990s, they were pretty beyond their time in subject matter.

Outfits

You cannot write about the Spice Girls and not mention their on- and off-stage costumes. Long before the crazy train wardrobe of female singers like Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj, the Girls had pretty awesome attire that featured a lot of glitter and platform shoes. Whether they were wearing short body-con pencil skirts, skin-tight cat suits or jogging suits, the ladies dressed according to their personalities, proving that you can express yourself through clothing and that it’s okay to wear whatever you feel like.

Spice World

Spice World is the ultimate reason to love the Spice Girls, bar-none. Between Victoria Beckham’s incredibly great comedic timing (who knew?), the music, the satirical portrayal of themselves (“Why do people stereotype us, all the time?” asks Sporty Spice in one scene) and the multiple cameos (including Hugh Laurie, Elton John and even Bob Geldof), Spice World is so bad that it’s actually pretty great and quirky. While it is by no means a Golden Globe winner (nor was it meant to be), it is fun and it’s a feel good movie in the sense that it makes you want to scream “girl power!” in a British accent for at least a week. I suggest that you dig up a VHS copy (you know you have one), grab a VHS player (you have one of those too) and have a Spice Girls night with your friends – costumes included.

Image Sources:

http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/sp…

http://www.usmagazine.com/uplo…