Customer Reviews

Spice Girls Revisited

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Apparently, it's still not common knowledge that "zigazig ahhhh" was Spice Girls slang for sex c1996. I find this odd, as my ninth grade class had figured it out for ourselves, right before we all realised that we were way too cool and mature to be Spice Girls fans, and settled for buying all their albums, reading all their interviews, being part of "ironic" tribute bands at school talent nights and concentrating on cultivating our alternative streetcred by talking up Alanis. What can I say, it was the nineties.

Anyway, that SHOCKING REVELATION aside, Spice Girls Revisited was a pretty good read. Sinclair maintains a good balance between exploring the Spice business -- from songwriting to product endorsements -- and gossip (apparently Mel B was unbearable by the end, but Posh is witty and self-aware).

What I particularly enjoyed were the chapters that put the Spice Girls in the context of wider media issues: a decision by The Mirror to declare the Spice Girls a failure while, by any objective standards they were the biggest band in the world, and the influence of the Spice Girls, and their one-time manager Simon Fuller in changing the face of the entertainment industry as we know it, with the rise of Popstars and Idol and family-friendly Disney popstars/actresses. Sinclair has a great deal of sympathy and affection for the Spice Girls, and points out every instance of institutionalised sexism in their media coverage, but he is detached enough to draw attention to bad decisions, poor behaviour and plain old obnoxiousness. It's only in the case of Emma, Baby Spice, that he never finds a bad word to say, and really, does anyone have a bad word for Emma Bunton?

I had greatly looked forward to reading this book, and I wasn't disappointed. I joke a lot about being into tacky biographies about British B-list celebrities of the 1990s, but really, that is a period of pop culture that I find deeply fascinating, and this book was a deeply rewarding read.