Spice (album)
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Spice
Studio album by Spice Girls
Released	9 October 1996 4 November 1996 4 February 1997
Recorded	1995 – 1996
Length	40:07
Label	Virgin
Producer	Matt Rowe, Richard Stannard, Absolute
Professional reviews
Allmusic link Entertainment Weekly (B+) link Rolling Stone link Robert Christgau link
Spice Girls chronology
Spice (1996) Spiceworld (1997) Alternate covers Japanese CD cover Spanish Limited Edition CD cover Taiwanese CD cover Singles from Spice "Wannabe" Released: July 8, 1996 "Say You'll Be There" Released: October 14, 1996 "2 Become 1" Released: December 16, 1996 "Mama / Who Do You Think You Are" Released: March 3, 1997

Spice is the multi-platinum debut album by English pop group Spice Girls, released in 1996 (see 1996 in music) and 1997 (see 1997 in music) by Virgin Records. It yielded the single "Wannabe", number one in 31 nations, including UK and US. In America the album produced three top five single's including "Say You'll Be There" in number three and "2 Become 1" in number four, this songs topping the charts in over 53 countries.^[1] In UK it produced four numbers one single's, including a Double A Side, "Mama/Who Do You Think You Are?".

"Spice" was a worldwide smash-hit, certified 10x Platinum in UK,^[2] 8x Platinum in Europe^[3] and 7x Platinum in US^[4] .With worldwide sales of 23 million ^[5][6][7][8] it is the biggest selling album by a girl group in history, and is currently listed at #41 in the list of 100 Best Selling Albums Of All Time.^[9]

Background

In February 1994, Chris and Bob Herbert together with financer Chic Murphy, traded under the business name of Heart Management, placed an advert in The Stage magazine, which asked the question: "Are you steet smart, extrovert, ambitious, and able to sing and dance". The management received hundreds of replies, but eventually reduced their search down to a final group of five girls: Victoria Beckham, Melanie Brown, Melanie Chisholm, Geri Halliwell and Michelle Stephenson. The new band was originally called "Touch" and moved to a house in Maidenhead. Emma Bunton was the last to join after Stephenson dropped out when her mother became ill.^[10]

The group felt insecure about the lack of contract and were frustated by the direction in which Heart Management was steering them. In October 1994, armed with a catalog of demos and dance routines, the group began touring management agencies. They started to meet with producers, musicians and other business executives, among them were composer Tim Hawes, and writers Richard Stannard and Matthew Rowe. Hawes worked with the group and watched the evolution in their singing and writing abilities. Together they composed a song called "Sugar and Spice", which served as the inspiration behind the change of the group's name to "Spice", eventually the name was changed again to Spice Girls.^[11]

On March 3, 1995, because of the group's frustation at their management's unwillingness to listen to their visions and ideas, they parted from Heart Management. The group stole the master recordings of their discography from the management offices in order to ensure they kept full control of their own work.^[12]

Recording and production

The group was supposed to meet with producer Eliot Kennedy the week after they leave their former managers, the meeting was arranged by the Herberts weeks before their departure. But without access to Herbert's address book, they knew nothing of Kennedy's whereabouts other than he lived in Sheffield. Brown and Halliwell drove to Sheffield the day after the departure from Heart Management and looked for the first phone ebook they come across, Eliot was the third Kennedy that they called, that evening they went to his house and persuade him to work with them. The rest of the girls traveled to Sheffield the next day.^[13] Kennedy commented about the session: "None of them played instruments, so I was left to do the music and get that vibe together. What I said to them was, `Look, I've got a chorus - check this out´. Then they were throwing lines at us. Ten minutes later the song was written. Then you go through and refine it. Then later, as you were recording it you might change a few thing here and there. But pretty much it was a real quick process".^[14] Two tracks of the album were composed in that session: "Love Thing" and "Say You'll Be There".^[15]

In the following months the group continue to met with producers, wrote new songs, prepared demos and searched for a new manager. They met again with the writers Stannard and Rowe, they worked with the girls in January 1995 before their departure from Heart Management; that was the group's first professional songwriting session, held at the Strongroom in Curtain Road, East London.^[16] In that session they wrote "Feed Your Love", a slow, soulful song which was eventually recorded and mastered for the album but not released because it was consider too rude for their target audience.^[16] Having completed that one, the girls wanted to write something more uptempo, so they started to write the song that will be the lead of the album: "Wannabe", which was recorded in under an hour - mainly because they had already written parts of the songs beforehand.^[17] The next song they recorded was a slow ballad and the third track from the album: "2 Become 1". The song was inspired by the special relationship which was developed between Halliwell and Rowe during the session.^[18]

In May 1995, the group was introduced to Paul Wilson and Andy Watkins, the songwriters and production duo known as Absolute. Watkins commented about their first meeting: "They played us a few tracks, which we didn't particularly like. But they played a track called "Feed Your Love", that was dark and cool. So we thought, this is ok. We can work with this".^[19] A songwritting session was booked within the next few days, but the musical association between them didn't seem to go well at the beginning. Wilson remembered: "When they started to sing it was never quite right: from our point of view. It was very poptastic". Watkins: "After two sessions we phoned our managers and said: `This just ain't happening´". It was at this point that Watkins and Wilson heard "Wannabe" for the first time. Wilson comments about the song: "We listen to it and we didn't get it at all. It was so different to what we were doing. We thought is this going to work?".^[19]

The next session was the definite one, either they continue to work with the group or break up their relationship. Wilson said: "Every previous time we'd met up with the girls we had prepared a backing track. This time we have nothing". Watkins: "They said they wanted to do something up and a bit of fun, so we just off the top of our heads started to come up with a full-on disco backing track which became "Who Do You Think You Are". Wilson: "The thing is when they wrote it, they were also writing the dance routine, constructing the video, all at the same time as writing the song. And that's when the penny dropped".^[19]

The girls went on to write: "Something Kinda Funny", "Last Time Lover" and "Naked" with Watkins and Wilson, none of them singles, but all of them tracks which lent a touch of classy R&B feeling to the Spice album. Absolute also produced all of these songs as well as the two tracks penned with Eliot Kennedy: "Say You'll Be There" and "Love Thing" giving the duo a guiding hand in six of the ten tracks that eventually ended up on Spice. The tracks that Absolute produced were recorded for the most part at Olympic Studios in Barnes. At this time, 1995, the Autotune facility had yet to come to the market and most of the vocals were recorded with few adjustments made afterwards.^[19]

Absolute told Simon Fuller about the group they had worked with, and asked whether he would consider managing them, Fuller receive a demo of one of the songs the group wrote with Absolute: "Something Kinda Funny".^[20] He showed interest in the group, began a relationship and decided to sign them at 19 Management. In September of 1995 the group signed a deal with Virgin Records, and continued to write and record tracks for their debut album while touring the west coast of the United States, where they signed a publishing deal with Windswept Pacific.^[21]

Writing

The Spice Girls were fully involved in the writing of all the songs. Halliwell in particular was clearly a fund of ideas for songs, arriving at sessions with her book of jottings, notes and miscellaneous scribblings which often produced the starting point of a lyric or a song title or just an agenda for the day's work. Watkins commented: "Geri (Halliwell) would come up with the concept for a song. Typically, she'd sing one line and the girls would pick up on it or we'd pick up on it and construct around it and then Mel C (Chisholm) and Emma (Bunton) would be very active. They'd really like to sit and sing melodies and go off and come up whit little sections".^[22]

They "conceptualized" and sang bits of melody and wrote the lyrics. But in musical terms it was not a partnership of equals. Rowe commented: "We have to kind of steer it". It was very different for different tracks really. Some of them were when we were all jamming in the room. We'd just put up some drum sounds and start making things up. On other tracks me and Richard (Stannard) would prepare something beforehand and play it to them. We'd have some lyrics and make them write the second verse".^[22]

Innovations

The Spice Girls introduced two key innovations that have had a lasting impact on the way which modern pop acts go about their creative business. Firstly they introduce the idea of songwriting identity. This was a familiar concept in rock bands like Queen or The Sex Pistols, but not in the world of "manufactured pop", where the credits of songwriting would be divided out strictly in accordance with whoever had written the song. The Spice Girls recognized their solidarity as a group, which depended on maintaining parity in all departments, including the songwriting credits and the resulting royalties. They share the songwriting royalties on all the songs irrespective of what any member of the group had or had not contributed to any particular song.^[23]

The second thing the Spice Girls established from the outset was a straight 50 – 50 split between them and their various songwriting collaborators. Here they anticipated one of the key developments in the pop industry since the 90s, namely the increasing importance of publishing royalties as opposed to royalties paiments made for the performance of the song on the record.^[23]

Content

Music and style

Spice is basically a pop album with a diverse inclusion of musical styles such as dance, R&B, hip hop, soul, rap and funk, which lead some reviewers to called a pop collection.^[24][25] The lead single, "Wannabe" is an uptempo pop song with a touch of white hip–hop, rap and dance music.^[26][27][28] Two of the three ballads of the album: "2 Become 1" and "Mama" are co–written and produced by Stannard and Rowe, and both feature the use of keyboards, guitars, string arrangments and backing vocals.^[29]

Production duo Absolute incorporate a mix of pop and R&B in "Say You'll Be There",^[19] which includes an harmonica solo, played by Judd Lander, who also played the harmonica on Culture Club's "Karma Chameleon".^[30] The other songs produced by Absolute features different music genres: "Naked" and "Something Kinda Funny" includes pop elements with influences of soul music and funk respectively.^[31][32] "Who Do You Think You Are" is very influenced by the early 90s europop,^[31] and incorporate a disco–style beat that resembles the music of the late 70s.^[33] "If U Can't Dance", another heavily dance–oriented song, features a rap section performed by Halliwell in spanish and contains a sample of the Digital Underground's song "The Humpty Dance".^[32]

Themes

The main concept of the album centers around the idea of Girl Power,^[34] embodying a feminist image is certainly not original, both Madonna and Bananarama had employed similar outlooks, but the individual images of the Spice Girls are both more pronounced and more important because the group were consciously aimed at a younger audience; they were able to tell them that they could forge a unique personality without losing close relationships as part of a group.^[35]

Every track of the album deals with different aspects of this philosophy: The lead single "Wannabe" makes demands of sincerity and is a feminist message of choosing friends over relationships, "Say You'll Be There" motivates girls to stand up for themselves as individuals;^[27] while the focus of "Love Thing" is the symbolic expression of unity as a group, "Something Kinda Funny" deals with the identification of goals in life and "Last Time Lover" encourage the use of sexual charm as a weapon to be deployed along with any other skills that would help to get a result.^[29][34]

Tracks

"Wannabe", the most emblematic song of the Girl Power philosophy, was chosen as the first track and lead single of the album, it highlights the slogans the group tend to cite like the union and solidarity between friends and the power exercised by women over men.^[27] Despite negative reviews from critics who found the track as "more a compendium of music styles than an actual song",^[26] and the group's image as a "pro-woman posing that project lots of false confidence",^[36] it was commercially successful topping the charts in 31 countries,^[37] and selling over six million copies worldwide.^[38]

The second single "Say You'll Be There" described the things the group have been through together and how always they been there for each other.^[39] It received mixed reviews, some critics praised it as a catchy song,^[28] others dubbed it as merely a bid for credibility,^[24] while others described the lyrics as "confusing".^[40] The single was successful, debuting at number-one in the United Kingdom,^[41] and peaking at number three in the United States.^[42]

The third single "2 Become 1" focused upon the bonding of lovers, and how it became so strong that they practically become one entity, through the act of sex; in addition the lyrics address the importance of contraception.^[43] The single received mixed reviews from critics,^[28][44] however it became the third number-one from the album in the United Kingdom,^[45] and peaked at four in the United States.^[46]

"Love Thing" is the fourth track; and it focuses in relationships and how after many disappointments they don't want to know anything about love. The song symbolize the Girl Power philosophy by showing the support between each other and finding the strength to continue.^[29] The fifth track, "Last Time Lover", was originally called "First Time Lover" and was about the loss of virginity,^[20] but was discarded and changed to a song full of provocations, where sex is the main issue.^[29]

The sixth track ,"Mama", was dedicated to the group's mothers, and deals with the difficulties in the relationships between mothers and teenagers that appear during the adolescence.^[47] Reviewers described the ballad as "glossy" and "corny".^[24][25] The seventh track, "Who Do You Think You Are" is about the presumptuous superstar life and how someone can get trapped in the world of fame. The inspiration for this song comes from some of the people the group met in the music industry.^[48] It was well received by critics, who thought that the song is one of the group's "strongest and underrated songs" and that it "feels relevant today".^[33][44] The two songs were released as a double-A side single, the fourth and last one released from the album, becoming the fourth consecutive number-one of the group in the United Kingdom,^[49] and reaching the top ten across Continental Europe.^[50][51]

"Something Kinda Funny", the eight track of the album, is about the "fun" the group experience together, and how it was fate that they know each other.^[20] The ninth track, "Naked" deals with vulnerability and the step from girls to women and how this process made them stronger, something the group was experiencing at the moment.^[32] It received mixed reviews from critics, some described it as "soulful and funky as anything by TLC or Brand New Heavies",^[25] while others considered the song as a "bit of a let down".^[44] The last track of the album "If U Can't Dance", deals with preconceived ideas about people and how sometimes they are totally different from what they appear.^[52]

Reception

Critical reviews

The album received mixed reviews from pop music critics. Allmusic's reviewer Stephen Thomas Erlewine called the album an "immaculately crafted pop" that is "infectious" and "irresistible", adding that "Spice doesn't need to be original to be entertaining" and that "none of the girls have great voices, but they do exude personality and charisma".^[28] Ken Tucker from Entertainment Weekly called the album a "devilishly good pop collection", and said that the lead single "Wannabe" is "perky yet tough, catchy yet melodically surprising".^[24] Lois Alter Mark from the same magazine, called the Spice Girls, "Go-Go's with attitude" and described the content of the album as a "PG-rated fantasies and come-ons", adding that "the girls may not be ideal role models".^[53] LAUNCHcast's Dev Sherlock called the album "pure upbeat ear candy" and that it was "one of the most fun and exciting pop releases of the year", adding that their Girl Power philosophy is "a well-balanced manifesto for young women everywhere that is neither twee nor riot grrrl-angry".^[25] Sputnikmusic commented that while "other pop music can feel generic, copied and lacking in emotion the Spice Girls bounce about with unbridled enthusiasm", adding that the album "defined the word spirit" and that it "socially, culturally and musically, truly did make the 90s a decade to remember" calling the album "the Thriller of the 90s".^[44]

Christina Kelly from Rolling Stone called the group "another bubblegum pop group" that "offer a watered-down mix of hip-hop and cheesy pop balladry", adding that the Girl Power concept is just a "pro-woman posing", and that "the girls don't get bogged down by anything deeper than mugging for promo shots and giving out tips on getting boys in bed".^[36]

Commercial performance

In November 1996 the Spice Girls released Spice in Europe. Despite negative reviews from others, it became an enormous success globally. The success was unprecedented and drew comparisons to Beatlemania (it was dubbed "Spicemania") due to the sheer volume of interest in the group.^[54] In just seven weeks Spice had sold 1.8 million copies in Britain alone,^[55] making the Spice Girls the fastest selling British act since The Beatles. In total, the album sold 3 million copies in Britain^[55] and peaked at number 1 for 15 non-consecutive weeks. In Europe the album became the biggest-selling album of 1997 and was certified 8x Platinum by the IFPI for sales in excess of 15 million copies.^[56] In the United States Spice became the biggest-selling album of 1997, peaking at number 1 and being certified 7x Platinum (for sales of over 7 million) by the RIAA.^[57]

Tracklist

+ Spanish Version of '2 Become 1'. Available on the Latin Edition of the album

Credits

Personnel

• Victoria Adams – vocals
• Melanie Brown – vocals
• Emma Bunton – vocals
• Melanie Chisholm – vocals
• Geri Halliwell – vocals

Additional personnel

• Absolute – multiple instruments
• Jackie Drew – violin
• Eric Gooden – background vocals
• Judd Lander – harmonica
• Greg Lester – guitar, rhythm guitar
• Perry Montague-Mason – leader
• Mary Pearce – background vocals
• Matt Rowe – keyboard
• Richard Stannard – keyboard, background vocals
• Tony Ward – cello

Production

• Producers – Absolute, Andy Bradfield, Matt Rowe, Richard Stannard
• Engineers – Adrian Bushby, Al Stone, Jeremy Wheatley
• Assistant engineers – Adam Brown, Patrick McGovern
• Mixing – Absolute, Andy Bradfield, Mark "Spike" Stent, Al Stone, Dave Way
• Programming – Pete Davis, Matt Rowe, Richard Stannard, Statik, Paul Waller, Dave Way
• Arrangers – Craig Armstrong, Mark Beswick
• Orchestra contractor – Isobel Griffiths

Certifications, peaks and sales

References

• Spice Girls (1997). Girl Power!. Zone/Chameleon Books. ISBN 0-233-99165-4. 
• De Ribera Berenguer, Juan (1997). Spice Girls. Editorial La Mascara. ISBN 84-7974-236-4. 
• McGibbon, Rob (1997). Spice Power: The Inside Story. Macmillan Publishers Ltd. ISBN 0-7522-1142-0. 
• Sinclair, David (2004). Wannabe: How the Spice Girls Reinvented Pop Fame. Omnibus Press. ISBN 0-7119-8643-6. 

Notes