SPICE GIRLS – "Who Do You Think You Are?" / "Mama"

Pretty much agree with this, except that Mel C’s awful, grating ‘do you think you ah-are?’s take it down to a (5). I like generic disco well enough; this’d be better slightly more generic.

I’m afraid I pretty much agree as well: although WDYTYA is at least as much fun to dance to (if, in fact, not more so) than their earlier singles, to listen to it is a bit less rewarding; it’s much less of an event, however competent and affectionate (if unexciting) this nod back to the late 70s is.

Is it simply that now the Girls have arrived, there is no need (perhaps also no means – certainly not ad infinitum) of making each single quite so special? Is it just that there is too much Geri on the song? Or that some lines and their singers are (in distinct contrast to ‘2 Become 1’) mismatched? – I have to agree with Izzy about that Mel C point….) We’ll see….

“Mama”, meanwhile……sounds like a pretty good, agreeably melodious B-side, that stays just (but only just) the right side of soppiness. Again, Emma shows off what a lovely voice she has, to good effect.

Not sure I’d go so far as to call this a misstep – but after an absolutely cracking introductory trio of singles, this was rather ordinary – ‘merely’ pretty good. There have been greater comedowns by acts who made similar initial impressions to the Spices than this; it’s still a bit early to be speaking of feet of clay, but the shoes they are wearing are certainly less magical than we had become used to. 6

Always wondered whether Mama’s flutes were an intentional reference to/steal from Talking Heads’ This Must Be The Place.

Mama would be a candidate for most forgotten Spice Girls hit although when you have WDYTYA to fight it out with for radio it was never a stayer

Being heard less Mama was a bit more pleasant at the time but now sounds very boring. This doesnt suit the group at all. Not something other groups could get away with.

In contrast to Tom I like WDYTYA. Maybe the fact that it’s been with as a constant reminder of late 1990’s nostalgia is causing a backlash. The up-tempo stuff seems to be in short supply after this. Other than a later bunny and stop from 1998 the letting-our-hair-down approach is more or less abandoned.

3 for Mama/7 for Who Do You Think You Are

#4 – Not that I would fully agree with the point of ‘merely good’ here but there is possibly an argument for it to be made. Someone made the point when we discussed ‘Call Me’ that Blondie werent as interesting than they were before that record as they were now’ superstars. Maybe WDYTA could be classed as the Spice Girls ‘Call Me’.

Both tracks are new to me, and each, while pleasant enough and perfectly acceptable fan-service, feels to me like it needed another week or so’s work on the writing. Another chord or two, and maybe some rethinking of lyrics and vocal arrangements, and they could both be career highpoints, potential classics (e.g., WDYTYA stompiness reminds me of all sorts of better tracks from Bohannon’s ‘Foot-stomping music’ to MJ’s ‘Get on The Floor’ to ABC’s ‘Tears are Not enough’ to ‘Da Funk’; WDYTYA could, I suspect, have been pushed much further and been brought much closer to this other level). The vids, however, do wonders, forcing us to embrace our new Spice Overlords, and fitting these songs in as chapters within the overall female-centric, grrl power manifesto. Objectively then these tracks are (high) 6s but there’s a lot of pleasure for fans here, and the Spices commitment to being a full-service pop group is incredibly endearing, so:
7

Trivia fact: When this single was at #1 in the UK, “Wannabe” was atop the Hot 100 giving the Spice Girls the rare feat of simultaneously topping both charts with different songs. I believe the Beatles were the last act to do this at the time and I’m not sure if it’s happened since.

SG releases remained out of sync until their 2nd album that fall. As a result this single was skipped entirely in the US and I had never heard either song until now. “Mama” was rather sweet, although not something I’d need to hear over and over again. I immediately wondered when Mother’s Day was in the UK (2nd Sunday of May in the US) and Tom’s post confirmed my suspicions. WDYTA was good, not great. Taken together they have a victory lap connotation which seems a bit early for a group with just three prior singles but I guess the Spice Girls were no ordinary group. 6/10 sounds right.

Mel B sings “Giving is good, as long as you’re getting”, there’s a cackle in her voice which suggests she’s not talking about the social contract.

That’s Geri isn’t it? At least that’s what the video suggests anyway – with Geri and Emma trading off the first verse, Victoria and Mel B trading off the second verse and Mel C doing the interjections on the bridge and outro. All very egalitarian.

My memory was that WDYTYA was great, the best thing that they’d done but returning to it, a couple of things struck me. Leading off with Geri as the opening voice is a bad idea (the last two months being the first time that I have invested much time listening to the Spice Girls closely, it definitely seems like there is a inverse relationship between quality and the amount of Geri you get on any given record). Also, it seems very rote – in fact, it could almost be that they have read The Manual and just bashed something out following that. Nevertheless, the chorus is classic, the horns work well for me and I am definitely coming around to the view that Emma might be the best voice of all of them. It’s not as good as I remember but is still decent enough.

Mama: I remembered this as being bloody awful, mawkish rubbish. It’s a lot better than I thought though. Sensibly using just Emma and Mel B for most of it, it’s not quite as sappy as I thought. The flute works well and the padding out at the end with, what will become, the “X Factor Gospel Choir” is also good for switching up the sound a touch, just as it might become a bit dull.

I’d have been 8/3 in 1997 – overall, I’d probably give this 7 now. WDYTYA coming down a touch and rescued by the chorus and Mama getting elevated significantly.

That the main track is also “The Freaky Trigger Top 100 Tracks Of All Time No. 49” tells you there is plenty of conditional love for this – less so in recognition for “mama” (all in lowercase). I’ll nod at Pete here…

All the “just good” Girls Aloud stompers are the children of Who Do You Think You Are, and as a piece of lego songwriting the three distinct parts of the song can be reassembled into countless Atomic Kitten, Sugababes and Pussycat Dolls tracks ad infinitum. Indeed take out the stomping chorus, and it becomes an almost vulnerable stab at pathos.

Mama is not terrible. WDYTYA I can recall dancing to energetically a LOT.

I think ‘Mama’ was the first Spice Girls tune to be played regularly on Radio 2 and this was still when it was more about Desmond Carrington than Sara Cox so another new avenue for Spiceworld.
There is nothing much to object to in either of these songs – ‘Mama’ is sweet but not icky and surely it makes a nice change to come across a hit acknowledging how great our mums are as opposed to the roles she’s too often (unfairly) ascribed in pop – spoiling the kid’s fun/source of grown-up angst. ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ is certianly better than the TV series of the same name.

Re 17: So ubiquitous by Spring ’97 they were on the packets of the nation’s favourite brand of crisps.

#WDYTYA marks the peak of Spice Mania – between 2 Become 1 and this not only were they everywhere but they HAD to be everywhere. It felt that wherever you looked the Spice Girls were doing a walk on, raising V signs and shouting girl power. I’ll be blunt – my sixteen year old self was starting to detest them at this point. WDYTYA seems to be their most enduring song though – it’s certainly the one I hear most frequently eighteen years on.

It also – albeit with a relative lack of opposition – held down the top slot for three weeks, the first time we’d had back to back three weekers since How Deep Is Your Love/ Firestarter a year before – not bad for the fourth single off an album most fans surely had. Boyzone held back the release of their latest single (also mined off a long available record) and still got stuck at two so there was no longer any doubt who the biggest pop act of the moment were.

Finally it has been noted that this was the 1997 Comic Relief single – for this one the charity simply approached the biggest pop act of the moment and attached themselves to their latest single; something they hadn’t done before and wouldn’t do again until 2011. In previous years Comic Relief attempted to do something original (I am acutely aware this gave us The Stonk – no need to point that out) and the next Comic Relief single along set the blueprint of a well known pop act doing a slightly goofy cover version.

I think, and I’m not certain, but I’m willing to risk getting shot down in flames, that WDYTYA was the first SG single with an proper dance routine for the kids. Wannabe might have done, but I don’t remember it. SYBT definitely didn’t. Anyway, as mentioned upthread, the Spicies were inescapable at this point. I’ll comment further once I have listened to both songs.

OK, to my ears, and I’ll keep this short:

“Mama” is a pleasant enough but rather generic-sounding arrangement which is ruined by a lyric which really, really didn’t need to be written. FIVE.

WHYTYA is better, a serviceable and quite fun disco pastiche, but it sounds like a B-side to which they’re not really committed. SEVEN.

WDYTYA has that generic ‘brass’ led disco sound (see also Dance (with U) by Lemar) that use to accompany a BBC1 continuity announcer giving you a run-down of Saturday night’s viewing. You can almost hear them telling you ‘It’s a night to forget for Charlie in Casualty at 8:30’.

There are two videos for WDYTYA, the Comic Relief one clearly for UK audiences and an international one that seems just as generic as the disco backing in comparison.

#28: Saturday night telly soundtrack OTM – and not a good era for it either. At my swimming club’s summer disco that year we had two ‘entertainments’ put on by the kids – one was the younger girls (11-13ish) doing Wannabe in full stereotypical-Spice getup and the other was the older boys (15-18ish) doing a Chris Tarrant Man-O-Man style press-up competition with their tops off (this didn’t seem dodgy in the slightest seeing as we saw them in swimming trunks for at least 3 hours every day anyway). I sulked at the back of the room throughout it all.

#29 “the earwormy Mama I love you/Mama I care”

Oh! I guess I HAVE heard “Mama” after all. It’s “Say You’ll Be There” all over again. I want to blame the song titles for being so generic but I suspect it’s probably my fault.

casino ridiculously wrong about america not taking to girl groups but i will grant there haven’t been many in this pure pop mode. tbf there hasn’t been much of anything in this pure pop mode until arguably recently, even during the late 90s teenpop boom it was only a facet of the landscape (and not nearly as dominant in the hot 100 as you might think). r&b and adult contemporary dominated american pop during the 90s and an act that could bridge both could do very very well on the charts (whitney, boyzIImen, tlc, MARIAH). spice girls were generally neither and came from a european lineage of pop, both conceptually and in terms of the actual music, one reason i thought ‘well this will never break in america’. by the time ‘who do you think you are’/’mama’ hit it was apparent i was wrong – ‘wannabe’ had hit in america and it obv it wouldn’t be the last (some real ‘america has fallen for england’s newest sensation – the spice girls!’ action going on, the last kind of brit invasion fever of that kind i can recall though there have been english acts since that have had bigger careers or even been bigger pop phenomenons)(hello adele). ‘who do you think you are’ and ‘mama’ were all over the radio in europe (though my memory tells me that ‘who do you think you are’ got the focus/airplay early and ‘mama’ got it at the tailend) but were never even released as singles in the us due to the delay in spicemania. that delay made the spice girls experience in america even more concentrated than it was in the uk and i think played a role in how quickly it went away. 1997 had been the year of the spice girls and when 1997 was over to an extent so were they. when i saw them in atlanta in 98 the peak as radio act had definitely passed, they had become strictly an act for the fans and aficionados but not much broader appeal, similar to one direction now i’d argue, and to me it seemed super apparent that the story was nearly over, in some corner of my mind i’m sure the comparison to the sex pistols tour of america came up. their mark had been made however and american boy bands that had nearly been pitched solely to european markets began to get pitched to american radio and mtv (now having figured out there was a ceiling to electronica’s penetration in america and probably having observed how well these teenpop acts did on the box, where the later spice girls singles also did very well), christina aguilera switched from an ac track to a teenpop one and britney decided to make a pop album cuz ‘pop came back’ even though up to that point she’d wanted to make an album like her favorite act, sheryl crow.

I remember in En Vogue and Salt’n’Pepa’s 1993 ‘Whatta Man’ – a long list of the qualities of the ideal man running over several verses – the final line jumping out at me: “Never disrespectful ’cause his mama taught him that”.

The first example of a pro-mother lyric in the charts?

David Bowie’s mother was no fool either.

John Lennon’s “Julia” is of course central to the Julia Lennon Theory of Creative Input. (“Julia” was his mum, whose death when he was 12 – she was run over as he was waiting for her to return home, acc.some versions as he was watching – was understandably a catastrophic event for him; and the theory notes that the people who get credited for a song – or who are listed as present in the time of its genesis – or for an oeuvre are not necessarily the ones who bear most pertinant responsibility for its shape… )

#43: That opens up a whole other world of music.

@39, @45 Maybe. But isn’t the whole point of The Wall that it’s Waters learning from his own experience to bring us some broader insights about human psychology and society, and the way they interact? After all, who could possibly be interested if it was just some super-rich rock star griping on about how miserable he is? 😉

That’s at the heart of my problems with ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 2′, actually: the way it generalises from Waters’ own no doubt miserable schooldays into a full-on anti-education diatribe.

We’re a long way from the Spice Girls here, though.

I’m going to make a generalising jump that may not entirely be merited: but on the whole I’d expect to find a good deal more respectful attention to the wisdom of earlier generations in black pop music of (nearly)* every kind than in the white pop that drew from it. Because of course (at least in the 40s/50s/60s), those white kids who were embracing black music – esp. in the UK – were attempting to break from what they felt was the suffocating and compromised stranglehold of their inherited culture and the values their relevant elders would like to pass on. This can mean that the identical trope in a mimicked song can mean one thing in one context, and quite the opposite in another.

(Most famously perhaps, the phrase “I’m a man” as sung by Bo Diddley and by white kids copying The Yardbirds. But I’d like to see this disparity explored within equivalent mum-tropes…)

*Interesting partial exception: the blues, which was often (not always) a music of flight and refusal, in regard to its local communities and pieties; of solitary young men on the move, sometimes pursued by hellhounds. Rap as it entered its most contentious gangsta-phase was pertinently often built round samples from the music the rappers’ parents fell in love to.

It occurs to me that we could be discussing this in the perfectly good “Another Brick” thread… hey ho.