Spice Girls at the New World Music Theatre, July 27
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We shouldn’t be surprised that the Spice Girls blew up so big. They rose like postfeminist giants, stomping on all comers with their great platform boots. After years of Pearl Jam clones and traumatized girls with acoustic guitars, the world needed some light entertainment. The Spice Girls’ music is fun. It’s upbeat and positive. It’s about girl power. They sing about the value of female friendships–and nuts to the boyfriend who doesn’t like it: “If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends.” They are the natural antidote to the half-dead hippie Ophelias of Lilith Fair. Hooray for the Spice Girls, for they are copers!
Anyone can be a Spice Girl; everyone is welcome in Spice World. It’s a color-free zone where little homegirls hang out with suburban WASPs. The group and its fans are multiracial and it’s no big deal. Fuck Paula Cole telling Rolling Stone she’s black on the inside–how come no one calls her on that? And that tambourine thing she does with her feet? God help us–that is the crap that should carry a parental advisory sticker. But in the Grammy stakes it was Paula Cole 7, Spice Girls 0. Despite their tireless efforts and huge financial contributions to its cause, even the industry is down on the Spice Girls.
After a 30-minute intermission so the kiddies could pee, the hits came pouring out, with “Spice Up Your Life” and “Wannabe” as the natural high points. One for the dads was “Naked,” sung while the Girls straddled chairs backward, the chair backs covering their supposedly unclad torsos. Screens closed around them, and when they reopened those cheeky Spice Boys had taken the Girls’ place. During Scary and Sporty’s rousing version of “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves,” girl power flashed up on the video screens to the teenies’ delight. Better this, I thought, than losing it over Hanson or the Backstreet Boys. For their encore, another costume change (into patched, flower-power bell-bottoms) and a cool rendition of Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family.” Finally, sitting together on the stairs all dressed in white, they dedicated their song “Mama” to the mums in the audience. There wasn’t a dry seat in the house.
