Movies Schmovies

It's no secret to anyone who's known me long enough that I spent the '90s without any discernable taste in music. I've accumulated a lot of shitty albums that generally gather dust in my box of shame. But since we've revived this blog, I thought it'd be fun to do a series of "music Schmusic" posts reexamining those terrible albums in a humorous and snarky fashion: you know, what the internet was made for. To start, I picked a nice low-hanging fruit, the debut album of the Spice Girls, "Spice."

Imagine my shock at discovering that, comparatively, it's not that bad. Don't get me wrong; it's not good, but after years of Britney Spears and Fergie and The Pussycat Dolls, this sounds like fucking Beethoven. There's harmonizing, and singing without pitch modulation and lyrics with subtext--anymore I feel lucky when I hear lyrics with text on Top 40 radio. By any sane metric, it's vapid pop trash to be sure, but it shows some measure of craftsmanship that's greater than what you'd hear on the pop station today. What does it say about our society that even the standards of prepackaged, manufactured soulless pop music have fallen?

All I know is that I'll take "Wannabe" over "Wind it Up" any day.