Spice Girl

They came from across the sea, armed with a couple of videos, five suitcases full of impossibly short skirts, a handful of infectious songs ("Tell me what you want, what you really, really want") and a slogan: girl power. Their reputation, promulgated across a great number of magazine covers, preceded them: They were the peppy, sexy new antidote to all those sullen, grungy boy bands that had come to dominate British pop music. These young women seemed primed for Stateside stardom by dint of the fact that their first three British singles hit number one. That the only previous acts to achieve this feat were Gerry & the Pacemakers, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Jive Bunny & the Mastermixers and Robson & Jerome--a decidedly mixed batch--seems beside the point. These are the Spice Girls. Resistance is futile. They hit America running as fast as it's possible to run in platforms. They did lunches, dined with the right disc jockeys, visited the right radio stations and made fun of some of those people later. But at the time they bubbled, laughed, smiled and thanked everyone for playing their records. In Los Angeles they were delighted to learn that their pictures had been painted on the side of a large brick building on Melrose Avenue. So, between promotional chores, they hurried to the site to have their pictures taken. When they got there, they sadly watched their mural being replaced by a painting of David Bowie.

But that was about as disappointing as life got for the Spice Girls in 1997. By the end of the year they had three more consecutive number one hits in the UK (take that, Jive Bunny!). Sales of their debut album, Spice, approached 20 million worldwide. The group hit the top of the charts in more than 40 countries and the Girls were looking at a net worth of some $50 million. A backlash, of course, set in.

The doubters are par for this course: Frothy, lightweight pop will always annoy those who prefer their music to carry more import and angst. Still, pop is the ticket if you want to become the year's best-selling act, or to cause a few tremors on the pop-culture landscape.

The Spice Girls have done both. In one widely seen clip, Prince William shyly basked in the company of the quintet. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela curiously remarked that his time with the women provided him with "some of the greatest moments of my life." In Washington, Hillary Clinton reportedly greeted Donatella Versace with the phrase girl power at a White House function. (Bill may well have said it, too, but let's not get into that.)

And in theaters across America earlier this year, young women screamed at the appearance of the Spice Girls during the opening scenes of Spice World. It was as if it were 1964 and the girls were watching the Beatles--with the difference that most were presumably hot and bothered over role models rather than objects of desire. Some 90 minutes later, a good number of them exited the theaters singing the words to The Lady Is a Vamp, the jazzy, stylized finger-popper that concludes the movie. The song is a tribute to famous females of the past--Marilyn, Jackie O, Charlie's Angels--and, not incidentally, to famous females of the present. "Scary, Baby, Ginger, Posh, Sporty," they sing, "Yes, now that's your lot."

Once they went by different names: Melanie Brown, Emma Bunton, Geri Halliwell, Victoria Adams, Melanie Chisholm. That was back in 1994, when they were dancers and models and wannabe pop stars who answered an advertisement placed by a manager looking to assemble an all-girl band that could inspire the same kind of pubescent adulation that, in the UK at least, greeted dodgy boy bands such as Take That and Boyzone. The girls soon parted from their original manager. They hung out together, wrote songs--or fragments that canny producers could shape into songs--and made the rounds, landing a new manager, record deal and producers. They changed their name from Touch to the Spice Girls. (Geri suggested just plain Spice, but that was taken.)

Despite their lack of musical experience, their appeal was obvious. "They came to the studio and sang a cappella in the car park," said Matt Rowe, one of their longtime producers. "Then they all sat on one another's laps in a chair. And I thought, Yes, this is the group for me."

The Girls claim they had their priorities straight from the start. "Right from the beginning, we said we didn't want to be put up on a pedestal," Bunton said. "We wanted girls to look at us and say, 'Fuck, I want to join the gang.' We didn't want to be out of reach."

"We were saying," added Halliwell, "that you can have that sense of freedom and fun too."

In the UK, at least, this attitude contrasted sharply with the glum louts whose dour music dominated the charts. "It was about time some fun pop was brought back, with positive messages," Chisholm told one reporter. " 'Cause with grunge and gangsta rap, it was getting really negative."

By the time their first album, Spice, came out in 1996, they had acquired zippier monikers: Mel B, Emma, Geri, Victoria and Mel C. But as the hits kept coming--first Wannabe, then Say You'll Be There, then 2 Become 1--the names were replaced by labels: Scary Spice, Baby Spice, Ginger Spice, Posh Spice, Sporty Spice. And with each label came a set of identifiable attributes: Scary Spice has a pierced tongue and frizzy hair and likes leopard prints. Posh Spice wears heels and very short skirts and looks bored. Sporty Spice favors warm-up suits and does kung fu moves. Baby Spice goes for frilly dresses and pigtails.

Then there's Ginger Spice, who's often dubbed the group's unofficial ringleader. (Some of the promotional material associated with Spice World, the movie, calls her Sexy Spice.) She is Geraldine Estelle Halliwell. Her father, now deceased, was a car salesman, her Spanish mother is a cleaning lady. Geri was born in Watford 25 years ago, which makes her the oldest Spice Girl. When she auditioned for the group, the would-be Svengali who was then running the show asked her how old she was. Legend has it she replied, "I'm as old or as young as you want me to be. I can be a ten-year-old with big tits if you want." His response was not recorded, but she obviously got the gig.

Before joining the Spice Girls, Geri held a variety of jobs, including club dancer in Majorca, aerobics instructor, model and game-show hostess in Turkey. When the group became famous and old topless photos surfaced in the tabloids, she reacted the way Madonna reacted to a similar situation years earlier: She shrugged it off. This makes sense, because she is a huge Madonna fan.

Some of her attributes are readily apparent, others less so. "The largest muscle and my life's biggest asset," she told Us magazine, "is my brain." She uses that brain to spice up people's lives. "Life can be hard, it can be negative," she has said. "So you can turn on to our video and put a bit of vitality and fun into it all."

Vitality and fun are favorite words of hers, and of the other Spice Girls. In conversation, though, the phrase they use most frequently may well be at the end of the day: It's their way of either summing up or shrugging off whatever they've been talking about so they can present a nice, positive moral. "At the end of the day," says Ginger, "we're about freedom, fun and liberty." "At the end of the day," adds Scary, "we're quite normal." At the end of every day in the imaginary realm of Spiceworld, vitality and fun and positivity win out--courtesy, of course, of girl power, a vague concept that involves accepting yourself for who you are, and not being pushed around by men. Mind you, their message is not exclusionary: "There are Spice Boys, too," they have been known to tell male interviewers. "You can be a Spice Boy. In fact, you are a Spice Boy." It sounds pretty simple: Be yourself, have fun, don't let anybody push you around.

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Onstage in Los Angeles last year, Ginger Spice leaned into the microphone. "I'd like to dedicate this to every woman in America," she said, holding up one of the pair of Billboard Music Awards the Spice Girls won--one for best new artist, one for album of the year. "This is living proof," she added, "that girl power works." Then she reached up, pulled her sunglasses off her head and down over her eyes, and affected a quick sneer. "Thank you very much," she said. It wasn't the best Elvis impersonation, but it wasn't bad for a girl from Watford.

The Billboard awards were part of a turbulent winter for the Spice Girls. They released a new album, which sold well, then weakened, then rallied. They put out a movie that got clobbered by Titanic but made decent money for a couple weeks. They fired the manager they'd hired to replace their original manager. They appeared on an extremely successful pay-per-view concert special. They denied rumors that one of the reasons they'd fired the manager was because he was dating Baby Spice. They denied rumors they were breaking up, or that any of them were going solo. They did Letterman. They won three American Music Awards, but weren't at the ceremony to receive them. They weren't nominated for a Grammy, which some people cited as a sign of integrity on the part of the recording academy. They heard countless naysayers suggest their 15 minutes of fame were just about up. They had another hit with Spice Up Your Life. They started a tour.

And one more thing: When they returned to Los Angeles, they drove back down Melrose Avenue, past the brick building that once sported their pictures until their mural was painted over for David Bowie. But now, a year since the Spice Girls' first visit, all traces of Bowie were gone. Instead, the wall sported a new mural of Scary, Ginger, Baby, Posh and Sporty Spice and a single word: Spiceworld.