Category: Girl Power Tuesday

I remember a day in what must have been about 2000 or 2001 in a gloomy Bonnie Prince Pub, when my fellow drinking mates and I – all students at ETH proud of their good taste in music – finally admitted (after sampling copious amounts of the liquid on tap) that despite their catering to the masses, secretly we did like the Spice Girls. We did not change the station when Christina Aguilera came on. We adored Britney Spears.

When she’s making headlines these days, it sadly tends to be because of her long and difficult struggle with conservatorship, and not for being “The Princess of Pop”. Having started her career in early childhood – winning gymnastic competitions and talent shows alike – her first breakthrough happened in 1992 when she was cast as a member of the rekindled “Mickey Mouse Club” alongside Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, and Ryan Gosling. After the show was canceled it took a few years before she returned to the big stage, but boy, did she have an impact, when she finally did so with “…Baby One More Time” in 1998, still at the tender age of sixteen.

The song was named by Rolling Stone Magazine as “the greatest debut single of all time” as recently as 2020. The video has been voted the best of the entire 1990s and one of the most influential in the history of pop music. And a whole generation of young men had their hormones thoroughly shaken up. But unlike other videos where young women cater to the sexist ideals of men the video was Britney’s own product from A to Z. The dancing? Her idea. The wardrobe? Her choice. The knotted T-Shirt? Her final touch. The music… well, that’s another topic (the song had been offered to both “The Backstreet Boys” and “TLC” before, but they were not interested).

And the “love interest”? Was her cousin Chad.

Her career had only just started. She would produce a row of other really big hits over the years, but they would become less and less successful in time. It’s hard to have an even bigger hit when you start at that level.

While one might argue that the original concept of “Boy Bands” probably dates as far back as the 19th century Barbershop Quartets, in the 1960s the concept took on a new facet, when “The Monkees” were drafted – as opposed to bands who formed themselves. This turned out to be quite a lucrative formula and so over time other bands were created with the specific goal of luring in the cash of teenage girls, most famously The New Kids on The Block, Take That, Backstreet Boys, ‘N Sync, or in newer times, One Direction. However, when two English blokes tried to apply the concept to a female band back in 1994 everything turned out a bit different.

They found their five members easily enough, having received hundreds of applications and only one of them was replaced by the time the group was ready to start recording. But… being the ambitious talents they were, the girls soon became frustrated with their management’s unwillingness to take on their ideas and parted ways, in order to full-fill their own artistic visions.

The principle would be applied more than once over the span of their career, not least when it came to the video of “Wannabe”, their first single. While considered flawed in several ways (“lighting!”, “old guys!”, “nipples!?!”) by Virgin, their new marketing channel, the Spice Girls insisted they did not want to do a re-shoot, and the commercial success would most definitely prove them right.