Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!

BABY LOVE

Emma Bunton, Spice Girl, one of the most adored, and derided, women in America.

Can a girl be too cute for her own good?! More specifically, don't the benefits of being Baby Spice shrivel to nothing next to the drawbacks of being marooned inside a potentially humiliating straitjacket of a persona? Neither of these questions were on my mind at the beginning of December, 1996. The Spice Girls had just made their maiden voyage to America to meet their soon-to-be enemies in the media and shoot the video for 2 Become 1. I did one of their first interviews here, which is to say I switched on the tape recorder while they shouted over each other for a half hour. Where Geri came off like a raucous motivational speaker, Mel B would have barked like a seal to get attention, Victoria was a little snippy and Mel C kept herself to herself, Emma --- who, in those days fibbed about her age, telling some magazines she was 20 and others 18, and puffed her way through a pack of cigarettes in public --- was reinforced sweetness. "I like you, I really like you," she said, aiming a full-beam, blinding white smile at me after we'd sat at the same table for 20 minutes. When no reply was forthcoming --- her charm stealth weapons could not penetrate my low self-esteem shield --- she huffed, 'You're supposed to say you like me back', leaving me thinking she was playing her little girl role like a Method actress.

"Babies are everywhere," observes an awestruck eight year-old. Her friend concurs: "I've seen one Victoria and one Mel C, but everybody's Baby!" The preponderance of blonde pigtails, white vinyl platform boots and short dresses in baby blue and hot pink provides startling proof that, in the new order of the Spice Girls, Emma Bunton is clearly homecoming queen. It's the middle of August, 1998, and I'm in Denver's Fiddler's Green amphitheater. I enter the Spice Girls' dressing room to find Emma clutching a cuddly pink rodent and messily gobbling her way through a plate of cherries. Thatfullbeam blinding smile switches on again. You might think, in an age when female performeres are proudly proclaiming themselves bitches and brats, that no one would want to bear the burden of Good Girl.
But Baby Spice is no role to be cast wearily aside after the final encore. "I'm not trying to get away from it all," she says of the child-woman persona. "When I do magazines they say, 'We want to take you away from that', but that's the way I am. Sexiness, for me, is not so in your face. When girls wear long, tight-fitted dresses, I find that sexy. Or when they're cute." But there was that poignant moment in the Spice World movie when she was forced to reflect on being known as Baby Spice when she turns 30. "I said that in jest. You can either relate to Baby to a little girl or you can relate it to..." (she affects a husky growl) "hey, baby. Baby doesn't just mean young and stupid." It does, however, mean a position as den mother to untold millions of screaming pre-pubescents."The girls always take the piss out of me and say, 'Oh, if she wasn't Baby Spice she'd be working in a nursery. I love the way children are, they're not corrupted by anything, they're honest and they say, 'Hey, you look shit today'." The affection is mutual, evidenced by the spot in the show where she hauls out a bashful young lad from the side of the stage, clutches his paw, sings to him and plants a smacker on his cheek. "My security people go out and look for fans and ask them if they'd like to come up. They're always up for it, except sometimes they go stiff." That neanderthal 'hur-hur-hur' you're no doubt suppressing comes gurgling out of my throat. "I didn't mean that," she blushes. "I mean they just don't move, which is very embarrassing." There's no getting away from it, she's a Good Girl. "This is the way I've always been. I'm just Emma."

Tony Blair knew what he had to do. It was December, 1996, and the affable, opportunistic leader of the refurbished British Labour Party had a national election coming up. The Conservative Party, in power since 1979, was falling apart, rocked by infighting and a series of ever-more entertaining sex scandals. Then the Spice Girls came out in an upmarket political magazine as Conservative supporters. True, only Ginger and Posh actually proclaimed themselves Conservative supporters, but they also labeled Tony Blair as "hollow, shallow, callow, and slick". For Blair, who had courted the youth vote to the extent that he encouraged the impression that he sought out and enjoyed the company of Oasis' Noel Gallagher, this was a slap that needed to be speedily spun to his advantage. Through the offices of the UK's weekly pop press Blair let it be known that the Spice Girls song Say You'll Be There was one of his Top Ten of the year and that "...there has been free and frank debate in the Blair household as to our favorite Spice Girl."
Plonk an alien down in the middle of any British city at that time and it would have reported back to the mothership that it was stranded in a screechy, lurid queendom known as Spice World. Endlessly discussed, dissected and debated on TV and in the press, the depth of the group's impact on their homeland could be gauged not only by commercial clout, but also by their effect on the national lexicon: female practitioners of over-exuberant behavior in any walk of life were instantly labeled 'Spice Girls', while British politicians debating on the Houses of Parliament even referenced the line, 'I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really, want!'
"What is the state of the government if we can have an influence?"" asked Ginger. "That's terrible." Especially since, in December, 1996, the Spice Girls had been famous for a little under six months.

back

Email: tic@kuntrynet.com