“Clearly, the proper response is to stop resisting.” Truth. 🤣
This is a terrific exploration of a song I probably wouldn’t have thought to explore deeply. Love it! And also makes me think of how I need to be specific about what I wannabe manifesting in 2024.
Thanks, Holly! I'm thrilled that you found me as well! Welcome to the club of wonderful wormheads. And yes, be specific about what you want to manifest, but it's okay to be general too. It leaves room for variation and variety.
I was also somewhat off the grid in 1995, working at a residential drug treatment program in Hudson Valley New York that was extremely conservative in terms of staying inside their evangelical bubble. Plus I was in a small town in the country with no car, so it was difficult to get out to see movies or buy music.
I was going the opposite direction in a way, living on an organic farm and baking bread at 3am and skinny dipping with a bunch of long-hair 20-somethings at the lake. There was no movies or tv but plenty of music. Mostly what we played ourselves. It was a blast.
All classics! I was only including the groups that were more or less put together by executives or assembled somewhat inorganically (like N'SYNC, Boyz 2 Men and Pussycat Dolls). I suppose the Runaways counts as they were assembled by Kim Fowley. There's a ton of great all-girl bands, The Bangles and Go-Go's being two of my faves. Also En Vogue, and then we are getting into TLC and Salt n' Pepa and suddenly I can't narrow anything down!:)
Great post. Loved the song (and the girls) as a kid, still love them now. They are ingrained into British pop culture in a way that, perhaps, only the Beatles and Oasis are.
Loved your reflection on what it is you might really, really want. I was going to suggest perhaps all you really want is to take a shit and smoke a cigar in peace, but you beat me to it 🤣 Happy 2024!
Their follow-up album (same title as the film) has some really terrific production and, for my money, catchier songs. “Never Give Up On The Good Times” is one of the best 90s pop songs most people have never heard. 🤘😊
Peeing in the garden. Smoking in the khazi. Waxing philosophical about Wannabe. Quite the banger to kick off 2024! Now excuse me while I go scrub my ear to get this damn worm out!!
I unashamedly love this song. And they do say what they want! They're addressing a potential lover and outline the crap they won't put up with.
"Forget my past." Too many dudes focused on how many guys you've been with before.
"Don't waste my time - get your act together." Don't lead me on - piss or get off the pot.
"Get with my friends" You're not going to separate me from them and isolate me.
"You have got to give - taking is too easy." Oh the stories every woman can tell about dudes who take but don't give.
This was radical in 1996, when it seemed every hip hop dude was talking about what they were going to take from their women and seem to have no respect for them. This was why it resonated so soundly. Plus, it slaps!
I have to say my fave boy band is Backstreet Boys but there's a huge legacy of both girl and boy bands.
And I wannabe more fully me - getting back to performing, being of service in joy. And having enough stamina to dance again!
I suppose they do say what they want, in the chorus: "If you wanna be my lover, gotta get with my friends" but I suppose I was looking for something a bit more spiritual. "You gotta get the approval of my friends" is a nice message, but it's one that doesn't really resonate for me as a mid-50s male. My wife definitely doesn't have to and never had to get with my friends. Some of them, sure. But I was never a drop everything for a girlfriend or partner at any point in my life.
I get the radical-ness of it in 1996; I was hunting for the radicalness of it in 2024! It does totally slap and it catchiness incarnate.
'Wannabe more fully me' sounds like a great plan. Here's to a lot of that this year!
It's not just the approval of my friends, "get with my friends" means time with them, hanging out with them. For young women, it's still radical as there's still a lot of possessive men out there. There's a rise on social media telling women they would be happier as a "tradwife", which includes focusing your life on your male partner. Not to mention all the girls being raised in patriarchal households. And there's now a whole movement with a segment of men saying women with "high body counts" (read sexual partners) are "low value" and should be avoided.
Ugh. Now I'm depressed. Thankfully no one in my life, now or ever, had that attitude. Yet another reason I'm glad to stay off social media. YouTube already is a cesspool (in the comment sections especially), so I keep a lid on that too.
I try and surround myself with wise, thoughtful, evolved people who are curious and open and work to better understand themselves and the people in their lives. I can already feel the stress of 2024 and the upcoming election cycle. I need to refill my Ativan.
I remember choreographing a dance with my 11 year old babysitter to this song. And you should definitely watch spice world for how bad it is :) happy new year!
Happy new year to you, Auri! It's great to hear from you! How many oscars have you won now?:) I can't believe it's about to be 15 years since you were an intern at Common Sense!
I can totally see 5 year old you choreographing a Spice Girls dance! Have you participated in any dance projects lately?
"I hope the appearance of the Spice Girls didn’t dissuade you from reading the first earworm exploration of 2024." Don't pander to the Spice Girl haters Steve! They deserve a ton of credit for being so massively popular in a sea of boy bands at the time. An all-girl pop group was an anomaly in 1996 and I think they represented the genre well. Even if pop groups aren't your thing, they made some catchy tunes that I think aged pretty well.
Very cool! I didn't know about this, but it makes total sense. That's what I was trying to do, in my own way, find new angles to celebrate this perfect pop song. The boyfriend "gotta get with my friends" original message didn't so much resonate with me, so I appreciate these other interpretations.
You are absolutely right, Jami! No pandering to the haters. But I've learned that sometimes a little pandering goes a long way in widening the view of gorgeousness in a person who hadn't realized their blinders were blocking so much out! I used to have blinders on regarding certain artists and genres and now I pretty much love all music.
I do give the SG's (my initials btw) a ton of credit. They are still relevant and their importance in their time is felt in music today and in film and TV as well. I'm thinking about an episode in Pen15 when Maya and Anna and friends are practicing a Spice Girls routine and Maya is forced to be Scary Spice and then be the girls' servant. It handled racism and wanting to fit in so effectively.
My goodness.....where does one start? From a pedestrian mid-'90s existence for our hero to the very embodiment of "pop music" excess and crass commercialism of that era....to (wait for it) a Marie Claire citing?!?🤯Is it any wonder we, your devoted following, can't wait for your next delivery? Surprises around every corner (and most sentences)! Nice!
Confessions: Loved Dream Street, who only existed on the boy-band planet for the first couple years of this century, but were fun to watch dance (and listen to), and had a tragic loss of one of their members impossibly early (Chris Trousdale). As for other boy bands (N'Sync, Backstreet Boys), I had little use for them, except for Nick Carter's bro, Aaron (another ultimately tragic figure) and his early career, which was fun and curious to watch.
Also, at the turn of the century, I was writing comedy pieces for a comedy compendium called "Corduroy Galaxy," which was a website run and populated by a gaggle of my hilarious high school youth groupers from my late-'80s turn as a pro L.A.-area church youth minister. I once wrote a piece touting the fictitious counterpart boy-band theoretically created by the management of the Spice Girls....The Herb Boys, with similarly adjective-filled names (i.e. Posh Spice, Sporty Spice) like Petulant Herb, Cranky Herb, Slovenly Herb, etc. I wish I could dig up the whole article, but I never saved it, and Corduroy Galaxy has been wiped off the 'net.
Ha - never heard of Dream Street. Though I like the name. The Marie Claire find happened in the 11th hour! I was happy just making up my own meaning of the phrase, but then I thought, I wonder if there is an actual answer.
I knew you would have a pun-wordplay story related to this - The Herb Boys made me think of the Jerky Boys, the idiot dudes who would make prank phone calls. And then it made me think of jerk chicken, and how the "jerk" is a combination of spices, so, in fact, The Jerky Boys could actually be named the Saucy Lads.
Sometimes its good when our creative dabblings in our younger years are not saved for posterity. I can't imagine being in high school with cell phones and the internet.
I like the twirl to the right they do on "magic," and that thing they do with their arms on the word "time"! The true "boys," there was none over 14, making by comparison, Nick Carter and his gang, The quite literal Backstreet Men. Chris is all in black in the center. He died at 34 in 2020 from a strep infection that put him in a coma.
Well, that ended my reply on a bit of a downer.....I should do an article about them....they are, otherwise, just a footnote in the turn-of-the-century, pop/dance/boy/girl-band era that was as forgettable as it was momentous!
Well, like the Rolling Stones said 500 years ago, "You can't always get what you want/But if you try sometimes, you get what you need." I'm guessing you've seen the Beckham documentary on Netflix?
I've had Spice Up Your Life as an earworm since it was in a recent Dr Who episode. I was sat at a table near theirs at the Riverside Studio in Hammersmith in the '90s and they were tiny- especially Ginger Spice, though what she lacked in vision she more than made up for in sound!
It's funny how Ginger was the only one who was actually a spice. Though it was given to her for her hair color, not the lovely root vegetable. I am not sure I could pick out their voices separately, but people seemed to think she had the strongest one.
The thing I remember most about "Wannabe" is that when it was released, I was working for a company that ran various entertainment forums on Compuserve. We were able to get the video of the song so that users could download it and play it offline on their computers. And despite the fact that probably 95% of the users had a dial-up connection (which meant it took hours to download), we had a couple hundred thousand people download it.
“Clearly, the proper response is to stop resisting.” Truth. 🤣
This is a terrific exploration of a song I probably wouldn’t have thought to explore deeply. Love it! And also makes me think of how I need to be specific about what I wannabe manifesting in 2024.
Glad I found you on the notes thread, Steve!
Thanks, Holly! I'm thrilled that you found me as well! Welcome to the club of wonderful wormheads. And yes, be specific about what you want to manifest, but it's okay to be general too. It leaves room for variation and variety.
Wisdom
I was also somewhat off the grid in 1995, working at a residential drug treatment program in Hudson Valley New York that was extremely conservative in terms of staying inside their evangelical bubble. Plus I was in a small town in the country with no car, so it was difficult to get out to see movies or buy music.
I was going the opposite direction in a way, living on an organic farm and baking bread at 3am and skinny dipping with a bunch of long-hair 20-somethings at the lake. There was no movies or tv but plenty of music. Mostly what we played ourselves. It was a blast.
Well in The ZugHaus we sing "I wanna ziggy-zug-AAHHHHHH..." because who WOULDN'T wanna Zug? Zug means to be on the move!
If I were to rank my girl band favorites I think it would be:
1) Wilson Philips (HOOOOOOOLD OOOON FOR ONE MORE DAAAAY)
2) The Pointer Sisters (were they considered a girl band?)
3) The Bangles
4) The Go-Go's
All classics! I was only including the groups that were more or less put together by executives or assembled somewhat inorganically (like N'SYNC, Boyz 2 Men and Pussycat Dolls). I suppose the Runaways counts as they were assembled by Kim Fowley. There's a ton of great all-girl bands, The Bangles and Go-Go's being two of my faves. Also En Vogue, and then we are getting into TLC and Salt n' Pepa and suddenly I can't narrow anything down!:)
Great post. Loved the song (and the girls) as a kid, still love them now. They are ingrained into British pop culture in a way that, perhaps, only the Beatles and Oasis are.
Loved your reflection on what it is you might really, really want. I was going to suggest perhaps all you really want is to take a shit and smoke a cigar in peace, but you beat me to it 🤣 Happy 2024!
Their follow-up album (same title as the film) has some really terrific production and, for my money, catchier songs. “Never Give Up On The Good Times” is one of the best 90s pop songs most people have never heard. 🤘😊
Me being one of them! I will check out that song and album. My love for straight up pop songs has only grown as Ive gotten older.
Peeing in the garden. Smoking in the khazi. Waxing philosophical about Wannabe. Quite the banger to kick off 2024! Now excuse me while I go scrub my ear to get this damn worm out!!
I'm not messing around!:) I hope I didn't raise the bar too high!
I unashamedly love this song. And they do say what they want! They're addressing a potential lover and outline the crap they won't put up with.
"Forget my past." Too many dudes focused on how many guys you've been with before.
"Don't waste my time - get your act together." Don't lead me on - piss or get off the pot.
"Get with my friends" You're not going to separate me from them and isolate me.
"You have got to give - taking is too easy." Oh the stories every woman can tell about dudes who take but don't give.
This was radical in 1996, when it seemed every hip hop dude was talking about what they were going to take from their women and seem to have no respect for them. This was why it resonated so soundly. Plus, it slaps!
I have to say my fave boy band is Backstreet Boys but there's a huge legacy of both girl and boy bands.
And I wannabe more fully me - getting back to performing, being of service in joy. And having enough stamina to dance again!
I suppose they do say what they want, in the chorus: "If you wanna be my lover, gotta get with my friends" but I suppose I was looking for something a bit more spiritual. "You gotta get the approval of my friends" is a nice message, but it's one that doesn't really resonate for me as a mid-50s male. My wife definitely doesn't have to and never had to get with my friends. Some of them, sure. But I was never a drop everything for a girlfriend or partner at any point in my life.
I get the radical-ness of it in 1996; I was hunting for the radicalness of it in 2024! It does totally slap and it catchiness incarnate.
'Wannabe more fully me' sounds like a great plan. Here's to a lot of that this year!
It's not just the approval of my friends, "get with my friends" means time with them, hanging out with them. For young women, it's still radical as there's still a lot of possessive men out there. There's a rise on social media telling women they would be happier as a "tradwife", which includes focusing your life on your male partner. Not to mention all the girls being raised in patriarchal households. And there's now a whole movement with a segment of men saying women with "high body counts" (read sexual partners) are "low value" and should be avoided.
Sadly the message is still relevant.
Ugh. Now I'm depressed. Thankfully no one in my life, now or ever, had that attitude. Yet another reason I'm glad to stay off social media. YouTube already is a cesspool (in the comment sections especially), so I keep a lid on that too.
I try and surround myself with wise, thoughtful, evolved people who are curious and open and work to better understand themselves and the people in their lives. I can already feel the stress of 2024 and the upcoming election cycle. I need to refill my Ativan.
Just a titanic, boss level earworm.
Girl group: The Runaways.
I remember choreographing a dance with my 11 year old babysitter to this song. And you should definitely watch spice world for how bad it is :) happy new year!
Happy new year to you, Auri! It's great to hear from you! How many oscars have you won now?:) I can't believe it's about to be 15 years since you were an intern at Common Sense!
I can totally see 5 year old you choreographing a Spice Girls dance! Have you participated in any dance projects lately?
Wow, I can't believe that was 15 years ago now! Just dancing in my livingroom holding imaginary oscars lol
"I hope the appearance of the Spice Girls didn’t dissuade you from reading the first earworm exploration of 2024." Don't pander to the Spice Girl haters Steve! They deserve a ton of credit for being so massively popular in a sea of boy bands at the time. An all-girl pop group was an anomaly in 1996 and I think they represented the genre well. Even if pop groups aren't your thing, they made some catchy tunes that I think aged pretty well.
And, how many pop songs get a cover video as part of a UN project: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/07/08/484921436/spice-girls-wannabe-wants-to-be-an-anthem-for-girl-power
Very cool! I didn't know about this, but it makes total sense. That's what I was trying to do, in my own way, find new angles to celebrate this perfect pop song. The boyfriend "gotta get with my friends" original message didn't so much resonate with me, so I appreciate these other interpretations.
You are absolutely right, Jami! No pandering to the haters. But I've learned that sometimes a little pandering goes a long way in widening the view of gorgeousness in a person who hadn't realized their blinders were blocking so much out! I used to have blinders on regarding certain artists and genres and now I pretty much love all music.
I do give the SG's (my initials btw) a ton of credit. They are still relevant and their importance in their time is felt in music today and in film and TV as well. I'm thinking about an episode in Pen15 when Maya and Anna and friends are practicing a Spice Girls routine and Maya is forced to be Scary Spice and then be the girls' servant. It handled racism and wanting to fit in so effectively.
Well said friend!
My goodness.....where does one start? From a pedestrian mid-'90s existence for our hero to the very embodiment of "pop music" excess and crass commercialism of that era....to (wait for it) a Marie Claire citing?!?🤯Is it any wonder we, your devoted following, can't wait for your next delivery? Surprises around every corner (and most sentences)! Nice!
Confessions: Loved Dream Street, who only existed on the boy-band planet for the first couple years of this century, but were fun to watch dance (and listen to), and had a tragic loss of one of their members impossibly early (Chris Trousdale). As for other boy bands (N'Sync, Backstreet Boys), I had little use for them, except for Nick Carter's bro, Aaron (another ultimately tragic figure) and his early career, which was fun and curious to watch.
Also, at the turn of the century, I was writing comedy pieces for a comedy compendium called "Corduroy Galaxy," which was a website run and populated by a gaggle of my hilarious high school youth groupers from my late-'80s turn as a pro L.A.-area church youth minister. I once wrote a piece touting the fictitious counterpart boy-band theoretically created by the management of the Spice Girls....The Herb Boys, with similarly adjective-filled names (i.e. Posh Spice, Sporty Spice) like Petulant Herb, Cranky Herb, Slovenly Herb, etc. I wish I could dig up the whole article, but I never saved it, and Corduroy Galaxy has been wiped off the 'net.
Ha - never heard of Dream Street. Though I like the name. The Marie Claire find happened in the 11th hour! I was happy just making up my own meaning of the phrase, but then I thought, I wonder if there is an actual answer.
I knew you would have a pun-wordplay story related to this - The Herb Boys made me think of the Jerky Boys, the idiot dudes who would make prank phone calls. And then it made me think of jerk chicken, and how the "jerk" is a combination of spices, so, in fact, The Jerky Boys could actually be named the Saucy Lads.
Sometimes its good when our creative dabblings in our younger years are not saved for posterity. I can't imagine being in high school with cell phones and the internet.
Here's Dream Street, and the closest thing one could call a hit, "It Happens Every Time": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0kbRx8kcEY
I like the twirl to the right they do on "magic," and that thing they do with their arms on the word "time"! The true "boys," there was none over 14, making by comparison, Nick Carter and his gang, The quite literal Backstreet Men. Chris is all in black in the center. He died at 34 in 2020 from a strep infection that put him in a coma.
The boys made a tribute video for Chris shortly after his passing, and just before what would've been his 35th b-day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF-dX-iBt4Y
Well, that ended my reply on a bit of a downer.....I should do an article about them....they are, otherwise, just a footnote in the turn-of-the-century, pop/dance/boy/girl-band era that was as forgettable as it was momentous!
I always favored Posh, but some pretty-guy soccer player beat me to her.
Well, like the Rolling Stones said 500 years ago, "You can't always get what you want/But if you try sometimes, you get what you need." I'm guessing you've seen the Beckham documentary on Netflix?
That's affirmative
I've had Spice Up Your Life as an earworm since it was in a recent Dr Who episode. I was sat at a table near theirs at the Riverside Studio in Hammersmith in the '90s and they were tiny- especially Ginger Spice, though what she lacked in vision she more than made up for in sound!
It's funny how Ginger was the only one who was actually a spice. Though it was given to her for her hair color, not the lovely root vegetable. I am not sure I could pick out their voices separately, but people seemed to think she had the strongest one.
I thinks she had the most successful solo career, musically, though Posh is probably worth more than all of them put together.
The thing I remember most about "Wannabe" is that when it was released, I was working for a company that ran various entertainment forums on Compuserve. We were able to get the video of the song so that users could download it and play it offline on their computers. And despite the fact that probably 95% of the users had a dial-up connection (which meant it took hours to download), we had a couple hundred thousand people download it.
Compuserve! Ha. Part of me longs for the days when we had to practice patience (a lot of it!) to watch a video on our computers.