Spice Girls
Song: "Holler"
Album: Forever
(Virgin)
by Patricia MacCormack
PopMatters Film and Video Critic
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From Emancipation to Political Emaciation
I saw recently on Fashion TV that, according to
various cultural commentators, we are experiencing a
rapid return to the greed and apolitical indulgence of
the 1980s. The observation takes me back to the first
time I saw the new Spice Girls clip "Holler." As a
self-admitted fan of the Spice Girls (they did put
bums on seats in my feminist philosophy classrooms in
the '90s), I was curious. 1999 gave us Mel C's
queer-tinged "Never be the Same Again," and Geri
Halliwell's Ginger-turns-bimbesque "Ma Chico Latino."
The brazen former Spice who, in "Spice Up Your Life"
had chosen a military (and presumably feminist)
commentator as her phantasy role of the future,
succumbed to more conventional women's activities --
blonding her hair, getting toned and tanned, and
singing about some Latin guy. This was disappointing.
And so is "Holler," which reverses the feminist Spice
Girls of the '90s, so they appear to be more
traditional, apolitical pop stars. The Spice Girls now
display success as thin, rich bodies, dressed in
familiar configurations of desire. They've replaced
their political commitment (Girl Power!) with a
homogenization of clothes and desires. The Spice
characters have all but disappeared, so that they seem
forced into a singularity of image and attitude. The
Spice Girls' earlier video clips -- "Spice Up Your
Life," "Too Much," "Say You'll Be There," and
"Wannabe," as well as their film, Spice World --
anchored their success in their heterogeneity. The
differences between the Girls were as important as the
ability of viewers to chop and change their
identificatory practices between the Girls, their
moods, and their outfits. Light, yes, even stupid at
times (who didn't end up exchanging castration-angst
stilettos for horse-hoof Buffalo-brand shoes?), but
always fun, always available, and always with an aim
to connect with other girls who liked the Spiceys, be
they the 8-year-olds touted as the only Spice fans, or
the 25-year-old lecturer who liked politics with her
pop. The first incarnation of Spice had something for
everyone because it presented so much in one band,
hence the names -- Posh, Ginger, Baby, Sporty, and
Scary. You could dislike one, but it was hard to find
nothing interesting about any of them, their songs, or
their clips.
In "Holler," the major differences between the Spices
are their choices of boy toys. This most interesting
scene sees the four Spices sitting in high-tech chairs
reminiscent of the alien telescope chair in Bava's
Planet of the Vampires, later copied by Ridley Scott
in Alien. Virtual reality visors perch in front of
the Spices' eyes, through which each visualizes her
perfect object of desire. Such a scene heralds the
great fear that post-modernism had about the coming of
age of the new millennium -- new technology, new
bodies, new representations, same old stories. The
ultra po-mo Spice Girls, once virile women creating
their own future, have settled from one that is not so
different from the past. The advanced technology
pictured in the clip is matched by the low-tech nature
of the desire it presents. Post-human bodies, strange
or strong femininities, are not found here. Girl Power
has been replaced by Gucci Power. The clothes are less
outrageous and so are the lyrics and the politics.
Here the Spice Girls' message ends up not that the
oppressed have a voice and strength, but that after a
certain point (or bank balance), they no longer need
to be concerned with changing systems. The Spices'
sexual "revolution" has produced a feminism that is
only concerned with the number of studs one can
libidinalise in a bizarre parody of owning your own
sexuality, as long as it is not queer and the object
of desire is theoretically more subjugated in culture
than you. Hence the boys in this clip are black.
Someday, it may be interesting to look back on this
clip and see whether this apparent break in the
heterogeneity of the Spices is actually a break with
political statement (no matter how simple) in their
work, or whether their former glossy cartoon-ish color
simply made it easy for their politics to be laughed
off by some or embraced by others. Perhaps the bland
non-event of the new Spice clip stands as one of this
year's many metaphors for the blandness of the
non-event millennium we all feared and failed to be
affected by. The Spices' feminism was never deeply
theoretical and so, I may be asking too much of them
to continue to represent what I read into their clips.
Apolitical pop here is not as much non-political as
banal.
