As a breezy, easy to read summary of a group and a time and a place, this short Spice Girls history isn't bad. The context isn't really there, nor would I expect it to be in a fluff piece like this (the photos and video clips provide most of the context the piece requires). It's true that boy bands ruled the charts in the UK for most of the 90's, but girl groups like En Vogue and TLC were big in US at the time, and worldwide it was a near golden age for female solo artists (Celine, Alanis, the Lilith Fair artists, and countless others). So the Spice Girls' world takeover was hardly unprecedented, but they were still revolutionary in that no other contemporary group had been marketed in that way (five divergent looks, five unique personalities) and they were marketed specifically to girls, i.e. they competed with the boy bands for the same fan demographics and won.
In reading histories like these, I'm always struck by how short-lived their fame was, compared to how all-encompassingly long it felt at the time. Spice Girls were at the highest strata of pop dominance. They were everywhere -- on the radio, in movies, in the tabloids -- with market penetration and omnipresence that only the likes of Michael Jackson, Adele, the Beatles, and a handful of other pop stars can lay claim to. And it all lasted little more than two and a half years -- from "Wannabe" in the summer of '96 to Geri leaving the band and their final Xmas number one, "Goodbye", in the winter of '98. It was still enough to make them the biggest selling girl group ever.
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