The Spice Girls really do have a positive message. It just took me 20 years to get it
Iwas 19 when the Spice Girls’ first single came out and already outside the upper age limit of their target market. I remember seeing the video for Wannabe, and being a bit sniffy about it. “Girl power” was a bogus PR ploy, Geri’s espousal of Thatcherism was absurd, and all that cavorting with Nelson Mandela at the famous 1997 press call was just the bloody end.
It was a long time ago. Twentyodd years later, the Spice Girls minus Posh are on their reunion tour and by some algorithmic fluke, while my kids are watching YouTube (don’t judge) up comes a video of them. At four years old, my girls are squarely within ideal Spice-range, and to watch them watching is to recognise the engagement of machinery hitherto unseen. Eyes on sticks, they stare at Spice Up Your Life, and for a second I can see what they see: a group of big girls doing a lot of little-girl things (glittery costumes! bunches! incoherent shouting!). I have never loved Mel B and co so much as I did in that moment.
My view is coloured by nostalgia, of course. To say the Spice Girls connected with my kids is an understatement, but my own response to the group was no less enthusiastic. Regarded through the
prism of modern times, they appear amateurish in a way that, despite the endless discussions at the time about the scourge of manufactured pop, reeks of a weird authenticity.
Remember all the op-eds? About how sexualised they were and whether this was OK, and was their message actually a positive one, and what did girl power really mean? I probably wrote some of them myself. Now, all that jumping around, hopping on buses, flirting with coppers while gurning at the camera looks as quaint as the 19th century.
And the weirdest thing of all: girl power, for all its spin, seems retroactively fairly convincing. They were normal girls with normal bodies giving every appearance, at least in the first instance, of having a properly good time – to which, last week, I found myself having an extremely elderly reaction. Look at these fun people! Look at how happy and blameless they seem! All right, they’re not Peppa Pig, but the push-up bras and belly rings are as cartoonish in their way as any madefor-kids TV, which even my four-yearolds can recognise as dress-up.
At the end of the week we watched a documentary in which the Spices were interviewed. After my girls were done shouting “this is boring”, they settled down to absorb the early audition footage and listen to what the women were saying.
There was Posh, saying something along the lines of “We weren’t the best, but we worked hard and did the best with what we had” – a message to which entire parenting manuals are these days devoted.
There was Geri, confessing with a laugh that if she hadn’t missed the first auditions and popped up to compete in the last 12, she would probably have never made it through the early rounds. Their confidence was the confidence of middle-aged women with nothing left to prove. One of my kids liked Ginger best. The other liked Baby. Late to the story, I liked them all.
• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
The push-up bras and belly rings are as cartoonish in their way as any made-forkids’ TV