ARTIST

Spice Girls

Stop. Check your high falutin' attitude at the door. You've entered the realm of Spice. Let Baby Spice pull her pigtails for you. Posh Spice paints a mean toenail. And don't forget Scary Spice and Sporty Spice; they just want to scream "Girl power!" in your ear and dance the night away.

The Spice Girls, Emma Bunton, Victoria Adams, Melanie Brown, Melanie Chisolm, and, for a while, Geri Halliwell (a.k.a. Ginger Spice) were the biggest pop group in the cosmos. No kidding. Their debut album, Spice, went to No. 1 all over the world, and the Girls have sold millions of albums. In England, they were front page news. Every day. Every week. Around the clock. The reason for this mass adulation lies in the Girls' campy, self-effacing personas and a batch of irresistible songs.

Founded in 1993 when they all answered ads in various trade papers, Spice Girls were soon paired with a songwriting team (Stannard and Rowe) who collaborated with the Girls on the songs that became Spice. The album's first hit, "Wannabe," featured a funky piano riff and the Spice Girls rapping a set of basically meaningless lyrics about friendship, love, and the eternal, infernal "zigzag ha." Their second global smash was the sticky sweet "2 Become 1," which could've easily passed for a mouthwash commercial. Oh well. Oddly enough, the hot funk of "Love Thing" sounds like it could've been penned by Lisa Stansfield, so contagious is its assertion of female power("God help the mister that comes between me and my sister") within an irresistible groove.

The release of the follow-up to Spice, Spiceworld, coincided with the campy Spice Girls movie of the same name, and while its somewhat lower sales figures, along with the firing of the group's manager and the "shocking" departure of Ginger, led cynics to declare that the Spice Girls were on the way out, that didn't seem to be the case. The Girls sold out stadiums coast to coast; plus they released a second line of Spice Dolls on the market and even starred in their very own PlayStation video game. Obviously, Girl Power continued to reign.

Written by Ken Micalle