Yesterday, At The Atlantic

I revisited the Spice Girls:

I had a flashback to the international insanity that made the band an international phenomenon in the first place. They really were kind of inexplicable, weren't they? The market-testing that went into designing the bandmembers' identities was so crass and obvious that no one ever bothered to disguise it in the slightest. They couldn't dance. Their singing was wildly inconsistent. Even in their sweeter, lower-tempo stuff, their lyrics were insipid. That Girl Power was a corrupted feminism-lite needs no reiteration. And yet, they kind of mattered. However crazy so many of us were, the Spice Girls were a charming derangement that spoke to a genuine hunger for female pop stars. And they continue to kind of matter, not as global superstars, but as a memory of that hunger.

The great secret of Josie and the Pussycats, of course, is as rotten as the movie adaptation was, it was a relatively honest look at how crass the teenybopper section of the music industry is. They've gotten slicker, of course, but no less shallow.