Spice Girls - “Spice Up Your Life”
Spiceworld, 1997
1997 was a weird year for music, consisting mostly of the industry dredging up the ghosts of music’s previous generations. Album reissues and greatest hits compilations from the likes of The Beach Boys, Queen, and Lionel Richie hit shelves, while bands like Yes, KISS, and the not yet publicly humiliated Ozzy Osbourne sought to fight against their irrelevance in the form of new studio albums. Grunge had taken its last flannel-colored breath, and its fetal-alcohol-syndrome-suffering bastard son post-grunge had yet to drool and slobber it’s way onto the scene. The void was filled with a lot of over-produced pop music. It was like the adults had finally had enough of the noise and banished all the kids to their rooms. It was a bad time.
How bad was it? The Spice Girls’ second album, Spiceworld, was released 12 years ago today. Sure, The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka came out the previous week, but it was a drop of greatness in a bucket of Celine Dion’s vomit (produced by Babyface, of course).
This song, an attempt to catch the manipulated lightning of faux female empowerment in a bottle for a second time, never reached higher than 18th on the Billboard chart. Even sadder is the fact that their call for the colors of the world to spice up their lives failed to resolve any global conflicts.
I believe it was around this time that I, while stopped at a traffic light on Valley Road in Upper Montclair, NJ, after three weeks of listening to the original cast recording of the musical “Rent”, had a sudden moment of clarity and exclaimed to myself, “Wait a minute! These songs are fucking terrible!” and gave it away the next day.
Is posting “Spice Up Your Life” BUYB’s jump-the-shark moment? Maybe.
3 days ago
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