The Spice Girls will do a brief spot at the Two Nations concert in Johannesburg on November 1. Kathy Acker wondered about their brand of femininism
Fifty-second Street. West Side, New York City. Hell’s Kitchen – one of those areas into which no one would once have walked unless loaded. Guns or drugs or both. But now it has been gentrified: the beautiful people have won.
A man in middle-aged-rocker uniform, tight black jeans and nondescript T-shirt, lets the photographer and me through the studio doorway; then a chipmunk-sort-of-guy in shorts, with a Buddha tattooed on one of his arms, greets us warmly. This is the band’s publicity officer. We’re about to meet the Girls …
They are here to rehearse for an appearance on Saturday Night Live. Not only is this their first live TV performance, it’s also the first time they’ll be playing with what Mel C calls a “real band”. If the Girls are to have any longevity in the music industry, they will have to break into the American market; and for this they will need the American media. The Girls and their record company believe that their appearance here in New York might do the trick.
There is a refusal among America’s music critics to take The Spice Girls seriously. The Rolling Stone review of Spice, their first album, refers to them as “attractive young things … brought together by a manager with a marketing concept”.
The main complaint, or explanation for disregard, is that they are a “manufactured band”. What can this mean in a society of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and En Vogue? However, an e-mail from a Spice fan mentions that, even though he loves the girls, he detects a “couple of stereotypes surrounding women in the band’s general image. The brunette is the woman every man wants to date. Perfect for an adventure on a midnight train, or to hire as your mistress-secretary. The blonde is the woman you take home to mother, whereas the redhead is the wild woman, the woman-with- lots-of-evil-powers.”
So who are these Girls? And how political is their notorious “Girl Power”?
Even though I have seen many of their videos and photos, as soon as I’m in front of these women, I am struck by how they look far more remarkable than I had expected. I find myself asking them: “If paradise existed, what would it look like?”
Geri speaks first, and she is, I think, reprimanding me for being idealistic. “Money makes the world what it is today,” she says, “a world infested with evil. All sorts of wars are going on at the moment. Everyone’s kind of bickering, wanting to better themselves because their next-door neighbour’s got a better lawn. That kind of thing.”
“Greed,” Victoria adds.
Mel C: “Instead of trying to be better than someone else, you have to try to better yourself.”
In a few minutes, they are explaining to me that The Spice Girls is a type of paradise, Spice Girls is a lifestyle. “It’s community.” That’s Geri again. She and Mel B – one in a funky, antique Hawaiian shirt, the other in diaphanous yellow bell-bottoms and top – do most of the talking. Mel C, in her gym clothes, is the quietest. Geri: “We’re a community in which each one of us shines individually, without making any of the others feel insecure. We liberate each other. A community should be liberating. Nelson Mandela said that you know when someone is brilliant when having that person next to you makes you feel good.”
“Not envious,” adds Mel B. These are the two baddest Girls. At least on the surface. I suspect otherwise. “It inspires you.” Geri again. “That is what life’s about. People should be inspiring.”
I can’t keep up with these Girls. My generation, spoon-fed Marx and Hegel, thought we could change the world by altering what was out there – the political and economic configurations, all that seemed to make history. Emotions and personal – especially sexual – relationships were for girls, because girls were unimportant. Feminism changed this landscape; in England, the advent of Margaret Thatcher, sad to say, changed it more. The individual self became more important than the world.
To my generation, this signals the rise of selfishness; for the generation of The Spice Girls, self-consideration and self- analysis are political. When the Spices say, “We’re five completely separate people,” they’re talking politically.
“Like when you’re in a relationship,” Mel B takes over, “and you’re in love, you feel you’re only you when you’re with that person, so when you leave that person, you think ‘I’m not me’. That’s so wrong. It’s downhill from then on, in yourself spiritually and in your whole environment. In this band, it’s different. Each of us is just the way we are, and each of us respects that.”
“As Melanie says,” adds Geri, “each of us wants to be her own person and, without snatching anyone else’s energy, bring something creative and new and individual to the group. We’re proof this is happening. When we first started as a unit, we respected the qualities we found in each other that we didn’t have in ourselves. It was like, ‘Wow! That’s the Spicey life vibey thing, isn’t it?'”
Geri turns even more paradoxical: “Normally, when you get fans of groups, they want to act like you, they copy what you’re wearing, for instance. Whereas our fans, they might have pigtails and they might wear sweatclothes, but they are so individual, it’s unbelievable. When you speak to them, they’ve got so much balls! It’s like we’ve collected a whole group of our people together! It’s really, really mad. I can remember someone coming up to us and going, ‘Do you know what? I’ve just finished with my boyfriend! And you’ve given me the incentive to go ‘Fuck this!'”
The Girls have been in showbusiness for years. Emma started when she was three. All of the others were professional by the age of 17 or 18. I’m beginning to understand why these Girls have been picked, consciously or unconsciously, by their generation to represent that generation. Especially, but not only, the female sector.
In a society still dominated by class and sexism, very few of those not born to rule, women especially, are able to make choices about their own work and lifestyle. Very few know freedom. None of the Spices, not even Victoria, was born privileged nor, as they themselves note, are they traditional beauties. Christine, a student of mine, watching them on Saturday Night Live, remarked to me: “They’re not even slick dancers or exceptional singers! They’re just the girl-next-door!”
And they are; they’re just girls; as more than one of them remarked to me: “We never really had a chance until this happened!” They’re the girls never heard from before this in England; look, there are lots of them; ones who’ve known Thatcherite, post- Thatcherite society and nothing else, and now, thanks to the glory and the strangeness of British rock-pop society, they’ve found a voice. Listen to the voices of those who didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge, or even to Sussex or to art school …
Geri: “I didn’t really know that much, you know, history, but I knew about the suffragettes. They fought. It wasn’t that long ago. They died to get a vote. The women’s vote. Bloody ass-fucking mad, do you know what I mean? You remember that and you think, fucking hell. But to get back to what Victoria was saying about us, that we never got anywhere, you know, the underdog thing. This is why I feel so passionate. We’ve been told, time and time again, you’re not pretty enough, you’re too fat, you’re too thin …” All The Spice Girls are now roaring.
” … You’re not tall enough, you’re not white, you’re not black. What I passionately feel is that it is so wrong to have to fit into a role or a mould in order to succeed. What I think is fan-fucking- tastic about us now is that we are not perfect and we have made a big success of ourselves. I’m swelling with pride.”
What does this have to do with feminism? When I lived in England in the Eighties, a multitude of women, diverse and all intellectual, were continually heard from. Is it also possible that the English feminism of the Eighties might have shared certain problems with the American feminism of the Seventies? English feminism, as I remember it back then, was anti-sex. And like their American counterparts, the English feminists were intellectuals, from the educated classes. There lurked the problem of elitism, and thus class.
I am speculating, but, perhaps due to Margaret Thatcher – though it is hard to attribute anything decent to her – a populist change has taken place in England. The Spice Girls, and girls like them, and the girls who like them, resemble their American counterparts in two ways: they are sexually curious, certainly pro-sex, and they do not feel that they are stupid or that they should not be heard because they did not attend the right universities.
If any of this speculation is valid, then it is up to feminism to grow, to take on what The Spice Girls, and women like them, are saying, and to do what feminism has always done best -to keep on transforming society as society is best transformed, with lightness and in joy.
Author Kathy Acker is famous for her novel Blood and Guts in High School. Her latest book is Hannibal Lecter, My Father