Holler - Spice Girls (2000)

After dominating global pop music across the 1990s, the best-selling girl group of all time introduced a third and final album by switching up their sound with American r&b producer Darkchild

When I was a small child growing up on the borderlands of Surrey and south west London, there would be daily situations in our family home where the tidal wave of pop music swept over my sisters and I — whether I wanted it to or not. More local than the addictive but distant products of Britney or NSYNC, a British contingent of groups like S Club 7 and Five played from compilation CDs, the radio in my mum’s car and limited channels on our television screen.

Sometimes I would try to resist the hype, refusing to admit that I shared my sisters’ tastes; that I was intrigued by mainstream sound’s sugary sheen. Other times I would give up the act and embrace the playful omnipresence of it all.

The Spice Girls, who remain the best-selling girl group of all time, were the obvious queens of my identity crisis. As I progressed through the early years of primary school in the late-1990s, hit after hit colonised playground conversations and soared to the top of the charts (a personal favourite being the trippy lullaby fairytale of Viva Forever).

Then as the end of the decade passed, I began more proactively looking away from pop, towards edgier and more racially inclusive genres like garage, hip-hop and r&b. And something unexpected happened.

After the Spice Girls’ first two number one albums, Spice (1996) and Spiceworld (1997), and Geri Halliwell’s split from the group, the turn of the millennium led to the group’s third and final release: Forever. To move beyond their tried-and-tested pop formula and embrace American r&b’s slick modernity, with its sexier swagger, deeper bass and 2-step inflection, producer Darkchild, or Rodney Jerkins, was brought in to help shape this next phase. He had been, and would continue to be, behind a baffling number of hits, from Whitney Houston’s It’s Not Right But It’s Okay to Destiny’s Child’s Say My Name to Brandy and Monica’s The Boy Is Mine to Michael Jackson’s You Rock My World.

Although widely regarded as a moderate disappointment by fans and critics who could presumably sense the Spice flame of yesteryear starting to flicker into lesser relevance, Forever’s opening and most successful single, Holler, became an instant classic.

For me, aged 9 at the time, and I’m sure for many others in a similar boat, it proved a perfect storm. I could continue riding the pop wave for a bit longer whilst recognising that it was changing in a trendier, if slightly forced, direction.

The beat has all of Jerkins’s characteristic bass jabs, drum thwacks, blurred melodies and vocal cuts. In the video, each Spice Girl represents a different element (earth, wind, fire and water, respectively). There is a dress code of black leather, a computer-generated backdrop of liquid metal fluidity, and its choreographed events take place within a morphing pyramid, slightly reminiscent of a 1990s television game show like Crystal Maze.

The song represents the nostalgia of a shifting musical conversation, a soft reminder of Britpop losing its innocence and American r&b’s influence making its way over to these shores at the late height of its golden era.

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