WEEKEND COLUMNISTS Perhaps it is the cold nights of November drawing in, or possibly just a rank bad mood. But I ask: has there been anything so repellent in British cultural life as the new song and video by the Spice Girls? It is called “Headlines (Friendship Never Ends)”, a title that hints at the momentousness of the much heralded reunion of the five women after several years of moody estrangement.
To judge by the video, it is the kind of reunion I imagine when the former states of Yugoslavia get together to discuss mutual sewage needs. They slink into a dark room in slow motion and adopt a series of pouts and poses that would shame a $10 drag act. The two members of the group who consider themselves sufficiently thin to be attractive are semi-disrobed. The others remain shrouded and shadowy. None of them relates to any of their freshly reacquainted friends. The sophistication of digital trickery forces us to ask: are they in the same room?
We need not dwell on the opening verse of the song (“The time is now or never, to fit the missing piece, to take this on forever, you make me feel complete”), because all pop lyrics are moronic: suffice to say that it contains four clichés and a non-rhyme, which is impressive even by current standards of idiocy. The chorus, on the other hand, actually haunts me, as it should any member of the thinking media: “Let’s make the headlines, loud and true.”
The Spice Girls are our fault. We should have ignored them and they might have gone away. In the honeyed summers of the mid-1990s, they brought out a respectable and catchy first single, followed swiftly by a trough of dross. They should have been idiosyncratic one-hit wonders, like Vanilla Ice, or Toni Basil, or Althea & Donna. But it was a strange time. The body politic was feeling frisky, and the sight of Geri Halliwell in that Union Jack mini-dress seemed to take on a spurious symbolic value.
She was interviewed in The Spectator and a series of ill-considered non sequiturs took on the gravity of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Here, for refreshment of the memory, they are: “We Spice Girls are true Thatcherites. Thatcher was the first Spice Girl, the pioneer of our ideology – Girl Power. But for now we’re desperately worried about the slide to a single currency.”
These remarks were widely quoted in the press. Why? What was it that prompted this bizarre level of attention? An American magazine decided that London was “swinging” again and put its pop stars on the front cover. Were we really so impressionable, and insecure, that we relied on these cheap symbols to define our era? Are we still?
The Spice Girls became international figures, despite producing a string of drippy ballads, opposite in tone from the zip and sassiness of their first hit, which showed how soon record company conservatism kicked in. A generation of commentators anxious to write seriously about popular culture expended thousands of words on the new phenomenon, but they made a fatal mistake: popular culture at the start had been serious, in intent and conception, and worked devilishly hard to be taken as such. Now it had largely been replaced by tat, but no one seemed to notice. The symbolism was paramount, and the results surreal. The Spectator really did want to know Geri Halliwell’s views on the single currency.
Most nastily of all, a new demographic was discovered, or should we say invented: the pre-teens. They copied the dead pouts and the crappy outfits, and pester-powered their way to commercial significance. They thought they were sexy, although they didn’t know what sexy was. Nor, it should be said, did the Spice Girls themselves, always too contrived in their moves to hint at the carnal mischievousness which is at the heart of cheap-and-cheerful pop (compare Sandie Shaw, Bananarama).
The Spice Girls managed a rarely sinister double achievement: they sexualised infants and they infantilised sexuality.
Am I falling into the same trap, expending these very words on the subject? Who, in the words of Alexander Pope, via that famous Times editorial of the 1960s on the Rolling Stones, breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? Is it right to object so cantankerously to what is essentially innocent, harmless fun?
But it isn’t harmless at all, much less innocent. There are popular art forms out there that manage to mine that seam. Some days ago I attended the premiere of a Bollywood movie, Om Shanti Om, that is going to take millions at the box office. It featured that charismatic veteran of the genre Shah Rukh Khan, who gave a model performance, both on-screen and in his introductory remarks, of wholesome, family-tailored modesty.
Bollywood, delirious in its high-octane romanticism, is a truly innocent art form. Significantly, it is catching on in our more sceptical climes – check out the popular dance classes at Sadler’s Wells.
Most western art turned its back on that kind of ingenuous entertainment around the time, perhaps, of the death of the Hollywood musical. In its place, we have installed the Spice Girls and their ilk (see their melismatic flailings every week on the ghastly The X Factor). They are inane, dripping with cynicism, dumbed down and hyped up. It is our fault. We seldom get the culture that we really, really want; just the one that we deserve.
