August 26th, 2018 11:32pm
Will This Deja Vu Never End
Spice Girls “Say You’ll Be There”
The Spice Girls spent the majority of their debut album singing songs about negotiating the terms of relationships and assertively stating what they did and did not want out of love. It’s remarkably mature stuff in retrospect – music for teens about setting boundaries, asking for what you need, emphasizing consent, and expecting emotional reciprocity. “Say You’ll Be There,” their best single, is about attempting to gracefully transition from friendship to romance. The lyrics are plain and direct, but respectful of the audience’s intelligence. You can certainly nitpick about whether or not their commodified “girl power” was Good Feminism, but I think in terms of presenting pop songs about love, they were Good Role Models. If only we could all be as forthright and sensible about relationships as the Spice Girls were in the mid 90s.
“Say You’ll Be There” is the sort of pop song that sounds relatively normal until you pay attention and notice it’s actually a little odd. The melodies are rooted in the glossy UK pop of its time, but its groove is heavily indebted to Dr. Dre and P-Funk. There’s a harmonica solo that sounds like someone doing a pretty good job of mimicking Stevie Wonder in the ’70s, and while it’s a major highlight of the song, it’s hard to fathom how it ended up in the arrangement. The pre-chorus has an elegant feel to it, but it slams into a proper chorus that sounds like it was deliberately designed so large groups of drunk women would eventually sing it together at bars.
There’s a bit of glittery disco glamour in the mix, but it’s nearly neutralized by how much the Spice Girls sound like a bunch of silly kids rather than the sort of bold, sassy women who fronted songs in the disco era. Those songs were aspirational, but the Spice Girls’ funk is highly accessible. Everyone’s invited to dance at their club, and they want you to sing along. And maybe when you sing along, you might just internalize some good ideas about love.
Buy it from Amazon.