Girl groups rarely get taken seriously in the pop industry or in subcultures. During the 1990s however there was a resurgence of consciously female groups across the board from feminist DIY post punk riot grrrls, to the wholly commercial Spice Girls. Various factors conspired to encourage the public and press to notice that there were girls in bands in each and every slice of the music market. A new wave of music press aimed at the teen market, MTV and the rise of the music video helped female musicians’ global visibility, but this was not without its price. Music videos, and bedroom posters from teen magazines, were the perfect vehicle to simultaneously market music by women, to women, but also to objectify them and their bodies at the same time. 

Punk’s Year Zero might have been 1977, but for the next wave of the UK’s music industry in all its forms and styles it was 1989. The year saw the Stone Roses, and Happy Mondays on Top of the Pops, and the year that Pete Waterman alongside Pete Stock and Matt Aitken (SAW) produced both highest selling album of the year (Jason Donovan’s Ten Good Reasons )and rerecorded Band Aid’s Do They Know Its Christmas. It was also a year that girl’s caused a stir. Madonna’s Like A Prayer video caused a religious backlash. 1989 was also the year that the Spice Girls took over from Oasis as the biggest band in the UK. Girl Power infected the charts. The nineties was dominated by girl bands, some organically grew out of literal sisterhood (All Saints, Cleopatra, The Reynolds Girls, Dannii and Kylie Minogue, Wee papa girl rappers, B*witched, The Corrs) whereas others were childhood best friends like Fuzzbox, Bananarama, and the Sugababes. Others were put together like Ikea flat-pack furniture designed to slot into the ever growing market (The Spice Girls, Atomic Kitten, Mis Teeq, Honeyz).

At the time journalists and scholars like Lucy O Brien and others showed that women in punk, hip hop etc, were dealing with the politics of gender head on, challenging stereotypes both within their own scene and in the mainstream. Of course not all girls sound the same or like the same music. Whether in post-punk indie bands, or made for TV pop groups, girls have a shared experience however; of not being taken seriously, of assumption that the real artist behind their music was a puppet master Svengalis like Pete Waterman (‘the Saddam Hussain of pop’. ) and of being set up against each other. In a cat fight frenzy the ‘Dream Girls’ always fall apart. Across genre, market, label or style; in the 90s girls took the mike, but they all had to justify their place there, over and over again.

The Spice Girls were described as the love child of Thatcher and Madonna in the press, but they saw their inheritance elsewhere. Women of colour in hip hop, rap and the urban scene paved the way for female musicians in the nineties . The major change in the 90s came from Female rappers like Neneh Cherry, Wee Papa Girl Rappers, Cookie Crew. These women didn’t just change the face and body of rap they changed its form and marked the death of ‘ego rap’. In interviews these artists would argue that girls work differently.  According to Neneh Cherry, unlike the boys and their fragile egos ‘girls are less scared of looking a bit of an asshole and laughing at the whole thing’. The Spice Girls talk about Neneh Cherry in an early interviews linking her to the importance of positive role models for girls. ‘For them, it was Neneh Cherry. All of them remember seeing her on TV in 1989, promoting her first single … “She had big medallions on, a little skirt, giving it loads and not giving a shit… She was singing about kids on street corners, getting themselves pregnant, real life things. And she had such an attitude that went with it. Especially doing a video when she was pregnant’ said Mel B. Baby Spice expanded; “I remember watching that video… She had big bovver boots on and her little dress and I thought, ‘Fucking hell, that looks well cool’.