Beatles and the Spice Girls? Well, there is no comparison, is there?

One group of bright young English things created and sold by the media, who took the world by storm, but left music critics shaking their heads at how terrible pop is. You can't call it music, can you? Especially given all the hype and products associated with them, their shameless promotion, inane comments about politics taken up by the media: as if they really know anything about real life. And the fabrication of their story, complete with made-up characters-baby, cynical, sexy...

Beatles, or Spice Girls? If you know anything about either group, you know that the above applies to both-even though Beatles fans will consider the comparison a complete travesty. How can you compare those 'five talentless bimbos' with the fab four?

Surprisingly easily.

The Beatles were five young men-John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stu Sutcliffe and Pete Best-from Liverpool who banded together in the late 1950s. They were a group of lads very into the emerging rock scene from the USA. Being serious about a career in music meant a hard slog of performances. They twice went to Germany to perform a series of concerts at a club for very little money.

In 1961 Stu Sutcliffe quit the band, feeling that he was letting his mates down as he couldn't really play bass guitar. 1962 saw a more significant line-up change: Pete Best was sacked by new manager George Martin and replaced by Ringo Starr as drummer. From that came the more familiar and famous line-up.

The Beatles' first single was "Love Me Do". It reached 21 in the British charts in 1963, and was followed by "Please Please Me". It went to number 1 and started the phenomena that baby-boomers keep going on about.

Depending on which story you want to believe, the Spice Girls were five young women who responded to an ad placed to form a pop group. That was 1994, and the successful five were Melanie Brown, Melanie Chisholm, Victoria Addams, Geri Halliwell and Emma Bunton. (Though, Emma wasn't picked until after a Michelle Stephenson had to quit due to personal reasons.) They went into the studio to record songs co-written by the girls and their producers-pure studio pop like that of the Minogue sisters, Take That and anything produced by Stock, Aitkin and Waterman.

That's a style that's characteristic of British pop in the 1990s. Yes, it is manufactured. It is designed to make maximum profit in as short a time as possible.

And, with the Spice Girls it worked.

"Wannabe" was their first release, and it went to number 1 in the UK. So did the subsequent three singles-all before the Girls did their first major live performance. Cynics love the fact that their first real concert was essentially a promotion for Pepsi.

And their characters-Scary, Sporty, Baby, Posh and Ginger-are perfect for the dolls, movie and I can see the cartoon series!

Which brings me back to the Beatles. Spice World, the Spice Girls' movie, has been compared unfavourably with the Beatles' Hard Day's Night. For those of you who don't know about either, essentially the plots are the same: wacky group of young popsters and their completely made-up (with some truth thrown in to keep the fans guessing) adventures in the world of fame. Nothing pretentious, just fun.

Then there's the politics. The Spice Girls made a splash during the 1997 English election campaign by being widely quoted as saying that Maggie Thatcher was the original Spice Girl: a silly comment blown way out of proportion, and immediately comparable to John Lennon's infamous (and misinterpreted) statement that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus Christ. Back in 1963 the Beatles were also used as pawns in a Tory campaign.

Just goes to show that politicians aren't shy of trying to jump on the current pop bandwagon when desperate.

But there's more to politics than just what politicians do.

The Beatles were a complete product of their times. It's not surprising that their lyrics are so heterosexist. Boys are forever chasing girls in their songs. After all, they were four straight boys living in an era where being gay was illegal.

The Spice Girls are a product of our times. The Spice Girls are hardly a dyke band, but they are on record acknowledging their gay and lesbian following. Plus, they changed one line of "2 become 1": "boys and girls look good together" (album version) to "love will bring us back together" (single version). Someone is obviously acting on homo-awareness.

As for the question of lesbian lust, Mel B is on record as saying "But the question was, would you sleep with a woman? Yes, I would. I'm pretty liberated." And Geri responded to the same question with, "Probably. It's like asking, would you ever eat strawberry ice cream? If you've never tried it you don't know if you like it or not."

Sporty, though, maintains that she is straight: "I've got a lot of gay friends but there's no confusion in my mind about my sexuality."

But that doesn't stop a girl from dreaming.

More than that, there's "girl power". The Spice Girls are feminist-at least in name, which at the moment is in itself a remarkable thing. After all, according to the boomer-feminists, GenX women have rejected feminism. Sure, the slogans on the CD sleeve might just be slogans, but you can't get away from what they are saying: "ITS A GIRLS WORLD; SHE WHO DARES WINS; SILENCE IS GOLDEN BUT SHOUTING IS FUN" and so on. As an academic said at a recent cultural studies conference in Sydney, if you're a feminist mother raising a 12 year old girl and want to give her positive female images that are popular, Spice Girls is it.

Fact is, both the Beatles and Spice Girls have a lot in common. They are both pop. The differences come from the fact that 35 years separate them, and from that has come the baby-boomers' disdain for the current teenage pop sensation. Okay, John Lennon proved to be a song-writer of note-but you can't say the same for the other Beatles, even if McCartney has had success with his boomer-pop.

Frankly, it's early days yet for the five girls. I'll bet that either (or both) Melanies have what it takes to have a halfway decent solo career. And Geri will have a go at it, too. After all, if 3 ex-Take Thatters can do it!

- Sarah J Groenewegen (c) January 1998