Spice Girls around Forever?

[european son]

MEL B has revealed THE SPICE GIRLS could yet reunite for a greatest hits album.

The star hopes the five girls will get back together to write one last new song for the proposed compilation. The group have not released any new material since their 2000 album 'Forever', though an official split has never been announced.

But Mel B, currently starring in the musical 'Rent' in New York, told the New York Daily News: "We will probably do something together as a group, but not for a while.

"I think they are going to release an album, and hopefully we will all get together and write a song for it.

"We keep on talking about it, but everybody has branched off to do their own thing."

Former band mates Mel C and Emma Bunton are expected to travel to New York to see their old pal perform in 'Rent' in the coming weeks.

ew.

[The Region Legion]

Nah, it won't happen, don't worry. Either Geri will think she's better off doing another yoga video or they'll get into the studio, egos will clash and they'll all storm off in a huff.

Either way, we won't be subjected to more Spice Girls.

[Utter Shit]

Say what you want about them as people, and there was hardly an ounce of talent between them, but the people behind them made brilliant, catchy pop music.

[mayer]

Say what you want about them as people, and there was hardly an ounce of talent between them, but the people behind them made brilliant, catchy pop music.

yes.... and no.

they made the mistake which many pop groups inevitably make. the third LP was an (R n' B- tinged... ugh) attempt to get all "serious", and it was destined to fail.

yeah, Wannabe was one of the most important hits of the 90s, but pop's moved on leaps and bounds since then.

[fanny splendid]

What is pop music now?

I'm confused.

I watched Top of the Pops on Friday, and it didn't become any clearer...

[Goldentony]

hmm

the mortgage must need paying

[Utter Shit]

yes.... and no.

they made the mistake which many pop groups inevitably make. the third LP was an (R n' B- tinged... ugh) attempt to get all "serious", and it was destined to fail.

yeah, Wannabe was one of the most important hits of the 90s, but pop's moved on leaps and bounds since then.

Agreed, I'm talking about the first two albums...I own them, though in my defence I was but a boy when they came out, but in retrospect they're both packed with quality pop music. The problem is that whereas really 'pop music' is whatever's popular at the time, it's also effectively a genre in itself nowadays, and 'popular music' is a continually changing thing, right now it's hip-hop, having just ended the R&B phase. The Spice Girls went with the 'let's go for the literal sense and make what the kids are listening to now, rather than what made us so popular in the first place' route, which I guess made them more money in the short-term but also killed their popularity in the long-term.

fanny splendid, as I sad above, I'd say that the current trend in popular music is hip-hop. As a 'real' hip-hop fan, this disgusts me...obviously it's the same with any genre that gets popular, the bland, 'appeal to everyone without anyone really LIKING the music'  artists get huge while the true talent is too inaccessible to the general public to get any airplay, it's always how it's going to be, but it's still annoying. Then again, the easy-access bland dance music that I go mental over every summer most likely has the true house/trance fans tearing their hair out, so I guess it goes both ways. Whatever, if Immortal Technique doesn't statr getting respect from both the hip-hop community and the general public in the near future, there will be murders afoot. Not really, I just love saying 'afoot'.

[fanny splendid]

I remember when pop music was fun.

But then both S Club Seven and Steps split up.

It's all The Rasmus and Busted, with a smattering of whiny white rapper.

[Utter Shit]

I remember when pop music was fun.

But then both S Club Seven and Steps split up.

It's all The Rasmus and Busted, with a smattering of whiny white rapper.

I love Busted...I have both their albums, and find both of them, but especially the first, to be brilliant, cheesy, inoffensive pop music. It's not going to expand your horizons, but it's unpretentious and likeable, and a great way to waste half an hour or so. It's the faux-rap music and shitty British R&B that gets on my nerves, there's nothing more annoying than an English girl putting on a Yank accent (I realise that this is at odds with my love for The Streets, but shush).

[imitationleather]

So exactly which region of Britain does the accent that Busted use when they sing come from?

[fanny splendid]

The OC?

Take your pick, falkirk or Norfolk?

[Utter Shit]

So exactly which region of Britain does the accent that Busted use when they sing come from?

Touché. As with The Streets though, if the music is likeable in the first place, then I can overlook the accent thing. With commercial British R&B and hip-hop (fucked if I'm saying 'urban'), it just bugs the shit out of me.

[gazzyk1ns]

Two Become One was a very good tune.

[mwude]

Two Become One was a very good tune.

What he said.  With great big fuck-off shiny bells on.  All other Spice Girls tracks I can't stand to listen to a minute of them, but 2 become 1 is absolutely lovely.  Although I always remember there being one of those brilliant cheesy key changes in it, but the version I downloaded hasn't got one.

It would make sense for them to get back together though wouldn't it?  None of their solo careers have really got off the ground.  Victoria Beckham can probably still get to number one with a combination of hype & a massive budget, but the rest?  Mel B has done fuck all of note.  Mel C is just a fatter version of Ronan Keating with a vagina.  Emma Bunton does stuff which is acceptably mediocre, but not exactly going to set the world on fire.  Geri is a despicable cunt & an oxygen thief.

[fanny splendid]

...and an interesting cure for schizophrenia.

[the hum]

I'm on a Chris Morris disussion board, and people are saying the Spice Girls were actually ok............nope, sorry I'm going to have to think about that one for a bit. *wanders off very confused*

[imitationleather]

Why, what music are we supposed to like? Songs where all the lyrics are about raping kids and taking drugs?

[Frinky]

Zing!

I think all of the early singles were pretty good - Wannabe excepted, perhaps, becuase I'm sick of that - but Say You'll Be There was pretty stonking. Remember that one they did for Comic Relief? With Dawn French etc in the video... the title escapes me, but that was also a fairly excellent slice of pop pie.

However, if they got back together, it'd be shit.

[the hum]

Why, what music are we supposed to like? Songs where all the lyrics are about raping kids and taking drugs?

Ohh I dunno, just the last place I expected to hear people singing their praises.  I always hated them with a passion, but they were admittedly probably the last pop act that I bothered hating.  After all, if they hadn't been around I'm sure something equally as loathesome would have been and equally as loathesome things took their place afterwards.  I realised there's no point in shouting at conveyor belts.

[sproggy]

What is pop music now?

I'm confused.

It's whatever the marketing people say it is.  The term pop music has become so bastardised since it's heyday in the 70's that it has now been rendered meaningless.

A similar metamorphisation has occurred to the term R&B, I mistakenly assumed R&B still meant Rhythm and Blues but the dirgey manufactured shite I hear claiming to be R&B today, is a mere mockery of the term.


Fucking hell, what the hell am I doing in SE?

[Frinky]

A similar metamorphisation has occurred to the term R&B, I mistakenly assumed R&B still meant Rhythm and Blues but the dirgey manufactured shite I hear claiming to be R&B today, is a mere mockery of the term.

I can only hope a be-blinged 16 year old picks up a copy of 30 Years Of Maximum R&B one day. That'd be humourous.

[Lt Plonker]

Now there's some R 'n' B. Fucking great they were, too.

[sproggy]

img manfred Man flyer

Now there's some R 'n' B. Fucking great they were, too.

Well anything with Paul Jones is good R&B.  His R2 shows are awesome.

[hands cold, liver warm]

The BBC did a series of documentaries called What If........ They covered what would happen if we all eat burgers and get fat or if the rift between rich and poor increases. The important one was about what would happen if the spice girls reformed. One expert claimed that the government might force the spice girls back together to deflect public attention from illegal wars and inadequate reponses to global warming.  

I think on the eve of any get together, a socially minded roadie or label executive will carry out a suicide bombing.

[Evil Knevil]

The BBC did a series of documentaries called What If........ They covered what would happen if we all eat burgers and get fat or if the rift between rich and poor increases. The important one was about what would happen if the spice girls reformed. One expert claimed that the government might force the spice girls back together to deflect public attention from illegal wars and inadequate reponses to global warming.  

I think on the eve of any get together, a socially minded roadie or label executive will carry out a suicide bombing.

It won't be a roadie. They don't need one to carry a poxy karoke machine around with them.

[Marcus Or Relius]

I never liked a single Spice Girls song and Wannabe in particular made me want to thrust big screwdrivers into my ears.

However, I must confess a soft-spot for Mel C's solo stuff. I liked a couple of singles from a few years back; not enough to buy the whole album - Northern Star - but I did download it the other day from Soulseek. It's not bad, she does have a fairly good voice and at least manages to sing her own songs rather than just do cover versions like the other four seem to do (although some of the lyrics deserve to be placed in the Baaad Poetry thread.)

If they reform, however, the harm to the cultural reputation of our nation will be enormous, and they should be set on fire in such circumstances.

[23 Daves]

I can't even be bothered to get annoyed about the Spice Girls these days - it feels a bit like living in the eighties and getting cross about the back catalogue of the Osmonds.  

That said, I do know that they did piss me off at the time, and I think it was largely their crappy, diluted political agendas that did the trick.  I know nobody was actually supposed to take them that seriously, but the fact that they were parading feminist renta-quotes and even talking about Malcolm X (seriously!) without any sort of context was supremely irritating.  Then turning it into some of 'pop movement'... And don't get me wrong, I'd feel just as irritated if some indie band did the same thing.  Geri Halliwell in particular is one of those people, I'm afraid, who seems convinced of her intellectual superiority despite having read very little beyond a few self-help books to actually back it up, and whilst I could just choose to ignore her I'm afraid I just find it annoying, in much the same way some of the rest of you get aggravated by Kate Thornton and her 'popular culture knowledge'.  

So then, they'd have been much more enjoyable as a band without all the "Girl Power" crap (which kind of went without saying) and if they hadn't believed their own hype and taken themselves so seriously so quickly (which contrary to what everyone else thinks I believe happened at some time around the second single).  All the adverts, the video for "Spice Up Your Life" with them 'looking down on' the "spice"world they'd created, etc, became supremely irritating at the time.  Over-exposed wasn't the word.

However, since we have to admit to liking singles, I'll plump for a later one - "Goodbye".  It may be the fact that I genuinely thought this would be their last single that cheered me so much, but I think I genuinely do like the song.  And that's one, strangely, that everyone seems to hate...

[Marcus Or Relius]

I know what you mean about their contrived polemic, as if they were some sort of group of radical progressives, rather than just five manafactured karaoke singers. The most infuriating time was when they met Nelson Mandela and Geri declared that the Spice Girl's fight for Girl Power was similar to Mandela's struggle.

If only that were true and Geri was forced to spend several decades in prison.

Let's not forget the crimes to which the Spice Girls - or at least their creators - were accessories too, namely the blizzard of similar girl groups that infested the airwaves, most of which faded so quickly I can only recall one, All Saints. In fact I remember an article in a paper around 1997 about a woman who had remortgaged her house to fund her three teenaged daughter's 'music careers'; she was going to turn them into the next Spice Girls apparantly, and enthused about how they would be a success. Curiously, I don't think she bothered mentioning whether the trio could actually sing, merely how they all looked the part, had unique personalities, would not just be another manafactured band but would...etc etc. Never heard of them after that. Presumably the warbling trio are all stacking shelves at Aldi and their mum is living in a cardboard box after her house was repossessed.

[Auntie Ovipositor]

yeah, Wannabe was one of the most important hits of the 90s, but pop's moved on leaps and bounds since then.

"Important"?

You're joking, right? I assume that was just a bad choice of adjectives.

I like a lot of pop music - by which I mean stuff that goes for the predictable chord changes and harmonies, predictable structures, and yet which still somehow managed to hit you in the gut emotionally, no matter how much you want to be more sophisticated than it is - but I think "pop" stopped being short for "popular" sometime around 1950, around the time R&B stopped meaning "rhythm & blues" and started meaning "popular".

I never got that bliss hit off of the Spice Girls that you get with good pop, popular or not. At no point did they stimulate that part of my reptilian brain that relates to driving around in a convertable in the summer with the music cranked.  At their very best, they seem like a less talented version of NSYNC - not a reason to dislike them, just a reason to question the use of the word "important".

Anyway, they're unforgivable to me because of the whole Nelson Mandela thing - which is really only one drop in the bucket, but that's the one that made them unforgivable to me.

[Utter Shit]

All the adverts, the video for "Spice Up Your Life" with them 'looking down on' the "spice"world they'd created, etc, became supremely irritating at the time.  Over-exposed wasn't the word.

But that wasn't their idea, it was their management's idea. I'd venture to suggest that they didn't even understand the implications of the video, more likely all saying how cool it was that they got to use that vehicle, and maybe Baby Spice doing some girly screams.

However, since we have to admit to liking singles, I'll plump for a later one - "Goodbye".  It may be the fact that I genuinely thought this would be their last single that cheered me so much, but I think I genuinely do like the song.  And that's one, strangely, that everyone seems to hate...

That or Viva Forever would be my favourite song by them. Perhaps I should change my name to Utter Cheese.