Power Play

“WANTED

R. U. 18-23 with the ability to sing/dance?

R. U. streetwise, outgoing, ambitious, and dedicated?

Heart Management Ltd is a widely successful music industry management consortium currently forming a choreographed, singing/dancing, all-female pop act for a recording deal.

Open audition”

That’s how it all began, 14 years ago, with a want ad in the British newspaper “The Stage,” and it would culminate with 55 million records sold, a debatable rethinking of modern-day feminism and props from the guy who helped end apartheid in South Africa.

Pretty heady stuff for five chirpy Brits whose first breakout smash contained the memorable couplet: “I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna really, really, really, wanna zig-a-zig ha.”

Ah, the Spice Girls.

Women in charge.

Eye candy.

Empowered females.

Scantily clad caricatures of the feminine ideal.

Their social import may be open to discussion, but their stats aren’t.

The Girls’ first hit, the afore-referenced “Wannabe,” remains the biggest selling single from an all-female act as well as the top debut single ever released.

The Girls sold more than 23 million of their first album, 1997’s “Spice,” they had more than 20 corporate sponsorship deals at one point and, in 1998 alone, they raked in $48 million, a record for a female group.

Reunited for their first tour in nearly a decade, the Girls sold 23,000 tickets in 30 seconds for the first of 17 sold-out arena shows in London.

Worldwide, more than 5 million fans signed up to be eligible for tickets on the Spice Girls Web site.

Their appeal is easy to grasp: five distinct, photogenic personalities, squeezed into brightly colored tube tops and Union Jack dresses shorter than a toddler’s attention span. They actually can sing (no lip syncing here) and gleefully espouse “Girl Power,” a femme-first ideology (and easy-to-market slogan), that quickly became their catchphrase.

“Girl Power” even made its way into the Oxford English Dictionary, which defined it as “a self-reliant attitude among girls and young women manifested in ambition, assertiveness and individualism.”

Of course, whenever a group of deliberately cheeky, seductively dressed hotties talk up women’s rights, there’s bound to be some dispute.

Is it an honest expression of female assertiveness?

Or is it little more than clever packaging?

And does it really even matter, either way?

Not particularly.

Some see a contradiction in the way that the Girls pay lip service to women’s lib while pointedly playing up their status as sex symbols, arguing that they objectify women as much as they empower them.

But there needs to be no disconnect between a woman’s body and her mind, and though they do represent an idealized notion of feminine beauty that few can ever realistically hope to achieve, there is a vocal, playfully defiant air about this bunch that renders them more than pop music pawns with no voices of their own.

Besides, “Girl Power” quickly went beyond gender lines.

“I know that ‘Girl Power’ is their philosophy, and being a male, it was hard for me to go around and holler it,” says Spice Girls fan Danny Sanchez, 28, from San Jose, Calif., who had tickets to see the Girls in concert earlier this week in his hometown. “But the girls basically did what they wanted, and didn’t care what other people thought of the them. That is what I was able to relate to, so I just made ‘Girl Power’ my own.”

And that’s what scads of Spice Girls devotees have done, regardless of how their heroines carry themselves.

The Girls are no longer even girls, they’re moms and wives and reality TV stars — the music is secondary, as it always has been.

This isn’t a knock on the group: They’re about self-affirmation as much as the songs, and if the throngs who pack into concert halls to see the Girls don’t take anything away from the group other than a glimpse at feminine assuredness, well, that’s the whole point to begin with.

Mostly though, it’s escapist fun, a chance for teens and 20-somethings to dress up and be a kid, hearkening back to those days when any battles of the sexes were confined to the playground — where they belong.

“Most people have made them a staple of their youth, to where people are embarrassed to listen to them and afraid to admit that they like the Spice Girls 10 years later,” says Michael Derouin, 22, a Spice Girls fan from Glen Burnie, Md., who’s coming to Vegas to see the group perform this weekend. “I want to be able to listen to the music I grew up with, remember all the fun of my youth and, for two hours, forget about the strife of being an adult.”

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0476.