Just when you thought there was nothing left to say about the Fab Five . . .

Apparently the Spice Girl’s specific target audience is teenage girls and men in their twenties. As a member of the second demographic, I can attest to the power of their "well-oiled global machine." Thus far I have only added $8 to their vast fortune, not even enough to buy Posh Spice a new Gucci button, and yet when I handed over the money to see their movie, SpiceWorld, I was forever a part of the Spice Empire. A tiny piece of coal shoveled into the financial furnace of the Gravy Train.

It has been noted many times before that the 1990s is only a composite of former decades, snatching random bits from the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, and calling it Retro. According to this perspective, history – as we approach the new millennium – is in the process of eating its own tail. In other words, there is nothing new under the sun, and the more we ironically acknowledge this fact, the easier it is to cope with.

In 1968, the Monkees released a film called Head, which begins with a song celebrating the joys of being the world’s first artificially manufactured band:

Hey hey, we’re the Monkees, you know we love to please, a manufactured image with no philosophies,

We hope you like our story, although there isn’t one, that is to say there’s many, that way there is more fun,

You say we’re manufactured, to that we all agree, so make your choice, and we’ll rejoice in never being free,

Hey hey, we are the Monkees, we’ve said it all before, the money’s in, we’re made of tin, we’re here to give you more . . .

In contrast, the Beatle’s A Hard Day’s Night satirizes the insanity of hysterical fame, but rests on the assumption that beneath all this fuss is some organic musical credibility. The Spice Girls have taken a leaf from this book, simultaneously poking fun at themselves while assuring us they are authentic, accessible people beneath all the hype. The Monkees were forever ridiculed for not being the "real thing," something they never tried to hide, in fact cheekily admitted. As a consequence, the Monkees have had the last laugh, as they mark a more profound shift in global trends than the Beatles represented in musical ones.

Gucci Gucci Goo

In this post-ironic, post-Milli Vanilli era, it is hard to tell the genuine article from the fake anymore, and when bands like Oasis release Beatlesque melodies with Beatlesque filmclips, and yet demand to be taken seriously (something a surprising amount of people do), we know something fishy is going on.

The Spice Girls themselves indulged in a little historical fudging in a recent "popumentary" about their rapid rise to the top. With a voice-over by a BBC-type spinster – who sounded for all the world she was narrating footage of Ghandi’s childhood or the Manhattan Project – this eye-popping piece of propaganda orchestrated some official amnesia as to the origins of the Spice Concept. Flagrant lies now seem to be a valid publicity strategy, as the girls told of how they all lived in the same house waiting to become famous. Perhaps a $30 million paypacket scrambles the memory a little, especially when it comes to the sequence of events. The point is that Branson’s Brats think that this re-writing of history is irrelevant – and the scary thing is they are right!

Which brings me back to SpiceWorld, the movie. Mel C (not Token Spice, but the Sporty one) said in an "interview" that the whole thing is a parody, which she defined as "taking the Mickey." Perhaps the Disney icon should set some alarm-bells ringing already. If A Hard Day’s Night was a parody, then the Monkee’s Head was a meta-parody. So what does that make SpiceWorld? Popstars have become like politicians, we don’t believe in them anymore, but we can’t imagine life without them. This enables them to get away with the most outrageous claims (such as, "The Spice Girls – They Don’t Only Sing"). As Thomas Pynchon said, if you get the people asking the wrong questions, you don’t have to worry about the answers. And as Karl Marx said, history repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. But what of the third, fourth and fifth time? And what if it started out as a farce in the beginning?

We can find a clue to these questions in the scene in SpiceWorld where the evil tabloid boss (played by Barry Humphries) asks his lickspittle who would care if the Spice Girls discovered a cure for déja-vu: something they’ve created in the first (second?) place. The Monkees movie was co-written by Jack Nicholson, who soon shot to fame as an actor in Five Easy Pieces. Like SpiceWorld, it was a comment on a media phenomenon late in its career (things move faster these days), and it also had avant-garde pretensions. The Spice movie had the good grace to wallow in its own superficiality (we know it doesn’t matter, ‘cause what you came to see, is what we came to give you, and give it one, two, three – Monkees).

Both films have cameos, although Gary Glitter’s was seamlessly spliced out of SpiceWorld after paedophilic material was found on his computer’s hard-drive. Hardly a positive figure for the kids. The crowd who saw Head would have been sucking on a joint, whereas the Spice Army suck on Chupa-Chups. The former’s self-referential structure celebrated the collapse between high and low culture, the latter celebrates the triumph of no culture. Blip culture. Blink and they’re gone.

All this proves that the Spice Girls give good Head; meaning of course, that they out-monkey the Monkees, while out-grocing (no pun intended) the Beatles. There is no doubting who will stand the test of time, but who cares when there’s no time like the present? What the similarity between the Monkees and the Spice Girls tells us, as two manufactured bands who wink at the audience while going through their pockets, is that history will never completely repeat or stagnate.

In the 1890s, French people in floppy hats thought that nothing new could possibly appear, and yet we eat our Cheese-whizz in front of the television wondering what the hell they did back then. Even in the mid-1970s, rock critics were telling us that music had reached a dead-end, and yet hip-hop, grunge and techno has taken the old elements and re-fashioned something exciting and fresh. In the case of the Spice Girls, or indeed Aqua, music is an in-joke told in front of a mirror for the benefit of an audience who’ve heard the punchline a hundred times . . . but laugh their heads off anyway.

It seems that everything leads back to the wise words of that other "artificial" band, Spinal Tap, who observed that, "The more things change, the less they stay the same."