Hypeworld: the Spice Girls' glitzy, ritzy idiocy

Check out Spiceworld sound clips at
The Planet of Sound.

There's just no hype in America anymore. Hanson? Nice try, heartland. Gone are the glory days of New Kids on the Block, Milli Vanilli, and even Elvis Presley. But across the pond, those Spice Girls have got a real Spiceworld going. In England right now, we'd have to weed through innumerable sidewalk vendors hawking Spiceshirts, Spiceskirts, Spiceships, and Spiceshite of all forms; all of the country's Spiceworld lyric sheets, if taken from pre-teens' bedrooms king-domwide and laid end-to-end, would stretch from Ipswich to Exmouth and back; there's Spice on the radio, Spice on the telly, Spice in the theatres, and undoubtedly extra Spice in your shampoo. Things you never thought "spicy" have suddenly become so in the pens of hack journalists nationwide. Ahh, the bliss of it all: frenetic, saturating, nauseating hype.

But here, in a land with a distinguished heritage of hype, scarcely a peep as the Girls prepare to assault the country with not only Spiceworld the album but Spiceworld the movie, as well. Thus far, the Spice bandwagon has relatively few takers on this side of the Atlantic. But if they're good enough for Prince Harry, they can't be all bad, right?

Could the source of the hype be the music? In the most unabashedly broad terms, music in Britain right now falls into two main currents: "indie" britpop and dance-techno. The Spice Girls are at once both and neither. There's no band, but the rhythms barely approach the complexity of a Radio Shack keyboard's preprogrammed beats. To lump it with techno would de doing a disservice to even techno's most ennui-inducing practitioners. Spiceworld has plenty of vocals, plenty of verse-chorus-verse singalong rigamarole, but the Girls are always singing about dancing; "indie" has a perverted enough meaning over there already. More than any one of these styles, they are all of them, and the end product is at its best perplexing, at its worst excruciatingly painful to the ear. "Move Over" tells you to drink Pepsi, "Do It" tells you to, well, "do it," and "The Lady is a Vamp" tells you that these girls are the best thing to happen to earth's women (and men) since Charlie's Angels.

So it must be the glitz of it all: five scantily-clad young ladies striking poses and dancing up a storm with unstoppable energy and contagious vigor, right? Sadly, the Girls are of the school that being beautiful means shedding clothing, regardless of what's underneath. So is dancing their salvation? If only we were so blessed. When wrenched from the loving arms of video sets and thrust onto the stage at an awards show or, heaven forbid, in front of a stadium of screaming fans, the Girls are lurchingly unwatchable. Each Girl has a pre-fabricated personality, complete with body language and poses. Sporty wears sports bras and kicks at the air, Posh wears black and runs her hands up and down her body, Scary shows her teeth, Baby smiles vacantly and giggles, and Ginger pretends she's still in pornos.

So if America never goes Spice, it won't be a total loss, but still, at least, a regret. It can be great fun punching around something like the Spice Girls--the most exciting thing from England since mad cow disease.

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