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While surfing the Republic of England's intertainment teleshunt (in my usual semi-search mode) last night, I came across a particularly intriguing biografeed. Prime Minister Andrew Ridgeley had just announced that Dame Geri Halliwell was joining his cabinet as the new Arts Minister, and Anglopop Channel 217 was running a Spice Girls [autocue: Spice Girls, Vital Spice, 1996-2032] career retrospective in response. Needless to say, I viewed it avidly.

After decades of growing used to the Spiceys being such a key part of the popcult landscape, you tend to think of them as always having loomed large in the hearts and minds of people everywhere. But, as this biografeed reminded me, 'twasn't always so.

The Spice Girls [sidebar: SPICE GIRLS, POPMUSIC, BRITISH; SPICE GIRLS, POPMUSIC, POST-BRIT ENGLISH] were actually looked down upon in some circles back in the prewar era. In fact, it was quite common to view derogatory crits of the Fave Five even after Dame Geri [autocue: Geri Halliwell, Ginger!] first left the band back in 1998. Hard to believe, I know--but as the man said, you could view it up.

Why? Back in the day, when Jeremy Gelbwaks was just the forgotten kid drummer from the ancient Partridge Family and not the forty-fifth president of the United States [autocue: Partridge Family, "I Think I Love You"] and even before Bob Dylan joined Fab Morvan in the reconstituted Milli Vanilli after the death of Rob Pilatus [autocue: Milli Vanilli, Shotgun Dance], there existed a considerable critical chasm between pundits and populace. You have to understand that this was the early days of tech, when crits were still a functioning profession unto themselves and tastemaking operated on a sort of caste system in the arts. Certain people were paid by zines (both pre-tech and early tech) and TV to dispense their opinions regarding product released in the various creative formats. Universal access to tech, lack of sales influence, and the due demystification of such corporate zine fiefdoms as Rolling Stone, Atlantic Monthly and Sassy [sidebar: prec. items] helped to end that type of medieval thinking; the war, generational shifts, and the dawn of the softwary helped finish off this crit priesthood.

It's easy to comment using 20/20 hindsight where popcult is concerned. But the more sidebars I view regarding this elitist state of affairs, the harder it is for me to fathom how consumers ever tolerated it. Professional criticism was so undemocratic, so contrary to the great chain of being between corporation, product, and consumer. It rested upon a very low-res view of the universe--like one arrogant fish trying to teach a whole school of fish how to swim properly.

Oh, there was some overlap between consumers and chatterers (in their professional demagogue incarnation). F'rinstance, another important form of '90s music, the so-called "grunge" and "post-grunge" movements of guitar rock as typified by Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Smashing Pumpkins [autocue: Rhino's Best of Nineties Mope Rock] garnered huge sales, massive influence, and love pats from these paid zine crits.

Nevertheless, professional crits were not kind to the Spice Girls, deeming their image insubstantial and their music unadventurous. The word that kept cropping up in the biografeed, a word I was unable to reference, was "bimbos". It was probably some sort of then-current colloquial term for critically-unappreciated musicians.

Last night's Spice Girls biografeed showed the two factors that led to the rise of the Spice Girls as an across-the-board popcult phenomenon. One was Dame Geri's joining the cast of the second incarnation of the TV series Charlie's Angels [autocue: Charlie's Angels theme, 1999 version]. A trailblazing blend of the intertainment genres of light-detective and fashion-drama, Charlie's Angels was hugely popular in all four runs of the series before the demise of network television in the early '10s. And as Dame Geri's star rose in the world of intertainment (commencing with her first Emmy Award in 2002), she met with parallel success in her ongoing singing career--headlining the outertainment music package tour then known as Lilith Fair in 2003, the year before its name was changed to Vulvapalooza [autocue: Geri Halliwell, "Too Lonely Without You" from Lilith Fair Live, 2003].

The other factor was the sheer doggedness of the remaining quartet of Spice Girls. Their constant touring and recording throughout the first decade of the century [autocue: "We Won't Go Away" from Millennium Spice] led to them eventually outlasting the tradition of a separate critical caste in popcult. Largely a product of the fading of the so-called boomer generation [autocue: Neil Young, Tales From the Hippie Death March], the institution of the Viewer's Rating System by Rolling Stone vidzine in 2007 [sidebar: VIEWER'S RATING SYSTEM] cinched the Spicey's place as the preeminent musical act of their era. The burgeoning solo careers of Melanie "Sporty Spice" Chisholm [autocue: Melanie Chisholm, "Funky Sweat"] and Emma "Baby Spice" Bunton [autocue: Emma Bunton, "Get On With Me!"], the reunion tour in which Dame Geri rejoined the band shortly before taking over for Michael Richards as the host of The Tonight Show [vidsplice: prec. item, Sept. 22, 2008] and the surprise selection of Victoria "Posh Spice" Adams as the first female James Bond [vidsplice: You Never Die Twice] cemented the hold that All Things Spice had on Western popcult by the start of the '10s.

Of course, no one could have foreseen that Melanie "Scary Spice" Brown would become both the most seminal and the most beloved English musician of the modern era. Her lengthy string of groundbreaking techno-soukous albums, starting with Senegal Swamp in 2009 and running through Astral Centuries in 2018 [autocue: Melanie Brown, "Souk"] confirmed her standing as a pioneer of worldtech music. She is most beloved, however, for her tireless performing for NATO troops on goodwill tours during the war. It was no accident that she was chosen by popular acclamation after the dissolution of the United Kingdom to compose the national anthem for the newly-born Republic of England [autocue: Melanie Brown, "O'er Albion's Green Hills"]. As Senator Drew Barrymore (R-Guam) said of Brown in eulogizing her on the floor of the U.S. Senate following the singer's tragic death in a skycar accident last year, "She was England's finest flower."

The most improbable story of all the Spice Girls following their last outertainment performance as a group in 2019 would have to be that of Emma Bunton. Her third husband, the Rev. Malcolm Frottage (an obscure Dorset vicar at the time of their marriage in 2020) was named Archbishop of Canterbury in a surprise announcement by the English Parliament two months after the wedding. While naysayers immediately deplored the move as a publicity ploy by the moribund Church of England, Emma and the Archbishop together promoted the ecclesiastical and spiritual reforms that led to that country's Great Awakening of the 2020s. She would be the first Spice Girl to be knighted, as she was declared Dame Emma Bunton by English Prime Minister Tim Henman in 2026.

Of course, anyone who follows the teleshunts of intertainment, outertainment, and England is well aware of this data. But I suspect most of you had no idea that the Spice Girls were once so callously denigrated by the self-important few. The Spice Girls--and, indeed, all of us as well--have come a long way since those dark days of critical derision in the mid-to-late 90's. Zigzig Hah forever!

As always, I've had fun bending your ear again, niche. Hope all eight of you (and any new skimmers tuning in) will catch my vid special, Captain Spaulding Explains the Blues: Live From Titan Station on the Captain Spaulding Network telefeed via Didactech Channel 341, 8 pm Central time, next Tuesday.

toujours l'audace,
Cap'n S

Hooray For Me!

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