Girls Aloud

[Undertaker]

Well they are back. not a bad effort actually

[Radiophonic]

Prefer this ...

[PoloPony]

I can't wait! I love Girls Aloud, and we know our guys do too

[glennjridge]

how I-tunes america hasnt gotten their last album yet is a freakin outrage.

[Patrick Bateman]

It's rather rubbish, isn't it? Whose suggestion was it for them to go urban?

[Radiophonic]

It's rather rubbish, isn't it? Whose suggestion was it for them to go urban?

Dire. It all seems a bit "I tell you what I want, what I really really want ... " at the start.

I liked their Supremes pastiche and the one that was all over the shop and (naturally) this. They were better than the Spice Girls.

[York Minster]

It's rather rubbish, isn't it? Whose suggestion was it for them to go urban?

It's awful garbage. And it wouldn't even play with the garbage in the US. It's production sounds dated and they sound like they are posing, which they no doubt are. I don't understand how forum members are often so quick to judge songs by the like of Ke$ha, Gaga, Posner, whatever, but Girls Aloud is sacred ground? (That said, I like some GA tracks produced by Xenomania).

For perfect up-to-date throway pop, I suggest this:

[Patrick Bateman]

They were better than the Spice Girls.

Genital warts are better than the Spice Girls.

[York Minster]

I remember liking Wannabe as a youth. It sounds just retched now. I'm pretty sure Say You'll Be There is still good though, though I admit I haven't heard it for awhile. Wasn't Anne Dudley on the first album?

[Patrick Bateman]

I recognised Wannabe as the spawn of the Devil the first time round. It was the deal knell for popular culture in the UK.

No Spice Girls = no reality TV, no X Factor, no Celebrity Family Fortunes, no Heat magazine, no Joey Essex.....

[PoloPony]

I recognised Wannabe as the spawn of the Devil the first time round. It was the deal knell for popular culture in the UK.

No Spice Girls = no reality TV, no X Factor, no Celebrity Family Fortunes, no Heat magazine, no Joey Essex.....

I see no correlation between the Spice Girls and those shows.

[Patrick Bateman]

I see no correlation between the Spice Girls and those shows.

Really? The Spice Girls represent the first intimation that literally anybody can be a pop star in the modern epoch. Of course it had been done before (Sheena Easton, for instance) but there was something so relentlessly plebeian (to use the argot of the moment) about Biffy, Bunty, Batface, Ballcruncher and the Fonz that they set the template for the next decade. It's really only a tiny step from the Spice Girls to Popstars and Hearsay. Significantly they also appealed to a younger demographic than pop had previously done; whereas teenagers were the traditional constituency of the pop chart, the Spice Girls appealed to tweenies. Look at all the ghastly tweenie acts that followed in their wake: S Club 7, Lolly, The Jimmy Savile Experience. And then there's the football crossover; Bunty and Becks were the harbingers of Heat magazine celebrity culture. To top it all off, New Labour are elected the year after Wannabe and the Spice Girls represent the apogee of intellectual attainment in Blair's brave new world of dumbed down cultural degeneration. Girl Power!

[Radiophonic]

Also: Ginger Spice was a judge on Popstars - one of the precursors of The X Factor - where they discovered all the members of Girls Aloud.

[York Minster]

Maybe you guys didn't have much of New Kids On the Block over there, but they were a "tweenies" groups. And Backstreet Boys were out before Spice Girls. Reality TV didn't hit the US until 2000 if I remember.

[Palpatine]

Maybe you guys didn't have much of New Kids On the Block over there, but they were a "tweenies" groups. And Backstreet Boys were out before Spice Girls. Reality TV didn't hit the US until 2000 if I remember.

Take That was the British analogue of NKOTB. The thing about "reality shows" hitting the US later than in the UK and the rest of Europe ignores the fact that almost all of the reality shows that became huge in the US in the early 'naughts - American Idol, Survivor, etc. - were European imports. If, as Patrick Bateman wrote, it's a tiny step from Spice Girls to Popstars, it's not a much larger one from Spice Girls to Kelly Clarkson and then to a show like Glee. You could probably make a good case that the Spice Girls are the most important pop group of the last two decades. They're the Typhoid Mary of modern pop culture.