Women in Music – Have a great weekend

Here at Underground we champion the right causes in Music –

We support the independent venues

We support the Indie labels

We support the Indie bands

We support diversity in music

And We support Women in Music

This weekend sees, what appears to be at first viewing, to be two events at different ends of the spectrum. At Wembley we see the final two nights of the Spice World 2019 Tour. The Spice Girls, The Girl band and originators of 1990s Girl Power take to the stage. Underground talks Spice Girls you might ask? Apart from the fact that the girls wore our shoes there is more to the Spice Girls than you might imagine. Shoot back to 1997 and The Guardian Newspaper commissioned post-feminist, post punk playwright and activist to interview the Spice Girls when they were on tour in the US. It wasn’t the sort of interviewer you would expect for the “Bubble-gum Girl Power “group and you would be forgiven if you expected a car crash of an interview. But wait! Here you have one of the most gifted and perceptive writers who had dreamed of being a modern-day girl pirate presented with the opportunity to interview the pre-eminent girl band of the age. She wrote glowingly of them, of their spirit, their dress, their lack of inhibition.

From the interview:

“It isn’t only the lads sitting behind babe culture, bless them, who think that babes or beautiful lower and lower-middle class girls are dumb. It’s also educated women who look down on girls like the Spice Girls, who think that because, for instance, girls like the Spice Girls take their clothes off, there can’t be anything “up there.”

The Spice Girls are having their cake and eating it. They have the popularity and the popular ear that an intellectual, certainly a female intellectual, almost never has in this society, and, what’s more, they have found themselves, perhaps by fluke, in the position of social and political articulation. It little matters now how the Spice Girls started—if they were a “manufactured band.”

What does this have to do with feminism? When I lived in England in the Eighties, a multitude of women, diverse and all intellectual, were continually heard from—people such as Michele Roberts, Jeanette Winterson, Sara Maitland, Jacqueline Rose, Melissa Benn. Is it also possible that the English feminism of the Eighties might have shared certain problems with the American feminism of the Seventies? English feminism, as I remember it back then, was anti-sex. And like their American counterparts, the English feminists were intellectuals, from the educated classes. There lurked the problem of elitism, and thus class.

I am speculating, but, perhaps due to Margaret Thatcher—though it is hard to attribute anything decent to her—a populist change has taken place in England. The Spice Girls, and girls like them, and the girls who like them, resemble their American counterparts in two ways: they are sexually curious, certainly pro-sex, and they do not feel that they are stupid or that they should not be heard because they did not attend the right universities.

If any of this speculation is valid, then it is up to feminism to grow, to take on what the Spice Girls, and women like them, are saying, and to do what feminism has always done in England, to keep on transforming society as society is best transformed, with lightness and in joy. “