Spice Girls - Spiceworld

Here's a challenge for you: abandon all preconcieved notions of the Spice Girls and their music. It's tough, isn't it? It's not easy to clear your brain of the cultural cobwebs that have been piling up as you've been force-fed feature stories, network news pieces, and televised performances over the past few weeks. With their new movie just hitting theaters and the Girls themselves embarking on a nationwide personal appearance tour to push their product, it seems as though Geri, Emma, Victoria, and the two Mels have been everywhere at the same time.

But put that all from your mind, and let's talk music. Stifle your giggles, children. Yes, the words "music" and "Spice Girls" deserve mention in the same article, and they fit together about as appropriately as "Hanson" and "pedophilia." In spite of their overpowering image and their ominpresence in the media, it has always been the music that has kept them on the radio, and from the radio to the minds of pre-teen girls around the world over the past year. The Spice Girls DO make music, and ya know what? It's pretty good pop.

"Spiceworld" the album hit stores several weeks before "Spice World" the movie, so these tunes have already been programmed into most top forty radio playlists. Thus it's easy to forget that more than an album, this is a soundtrack, pieced together from songs featured in a motion picture. As such, it takes on a life beyond the music itself. After seeing the movie, it's impossible not to listen to the sultry balladry of "Too Much" and conjure up images of the come-hither looks beamed out from the movie screen during the opening shots of "Spice World."

Most of the songs on this CD are informed by a film-music sensibility. It's crammed with ten times more catchy hooks than the Spice Girls' debut record, "Spice." Every song is a potential single (and this reviewer wouldn't be shocked to the gills if every song on the damn CD eventually became a single), with an emphasis on upbeat dance numbers as opposed to the more balanced grooves of "Spice." These are clearly tunes to be featured in a motion picture, written and performed so that every audience member will leave the movie gigaplex humming and tapping their feet (and hopefully head straight over to the record store to pick up the album).

None of this is BAD, people. So it's movie music. So were "Live and Let Die," "The Beginning is the End," and "Help!" to name a few. All great pop tunes. Movie music needs more energy and melody to grab the ears of a movie audience, so the raised ante only produces more pure pop for now people. No one knocks on Bob Dylan for composing "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" (written for the film "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid") with an easily hummed and repeated chorus. There are just different standards in use.

As for the music on its own terms, it's good, raunchy fun. I've heard the music of the Spice Girls called boring, obnoxious, and stupid. If high-energy pop with no brain cells and intensely memorable melodies aren't your thing, go crank up the "girl power" of Ani Difranco or Tori Amos. POP doesn't necessarily have to equal DISGUSTING, and it certainly doesn't on "Spiceworld." Tunes like "Spice Up Your Life" and "Do It" run toward your ear and drag your attention to the stereo with all the energy of that obnoxiously fun girl at the school dance running over to you and pulling you onto the dance floor. "Too Much," perhaps the album's finest moment and one of its few ballads, slithers and vamps its way through four-and-a-half minutes of the best Bond movie theme song that never appeared in a Bond movie. It's an amazingly sexy tune, with each of the girls giving the lines a leg-crossingly sultry delivery.

Some may be able to maintain their perch atop the rock-crit high horse and resist the infectious temptations of "Spiceworld," but I certainly can't, and I don't want to. Sure, they're manufactured and crassly commercial and are making more money for doing nothing than most people make working every day all of their lives. But when I want my ass to wiggle and my ears want some candy, the DIY ethic of Difranco and other "serious" women artists just don't cut it. When I want to spice up MY life, I'll blissfully pop in "Spiceworld" and dance with impunity. I've bought and enjoyed enough Springsteen, Dylan, and Costello to deserve some utterly mindless fun once in a while.