YMMV / Spice Girls

• Accidental Innuendo: According to Word of God, the lyric in 'Wannabe' - "if you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends" - means that you have to be accepted by the girl's friends before you can date her. However the choice of words "get with" makes it sound like it's proposing a threesome or sex with the friends as a warm up.
• Angst? What Angst?: They all vehemently denied any tension within the group. Eventually, most of them fessed up and discussed it, but Emma remained all smiles. To their credit, all the in-fighting remained purely behind-the-scenes and they have all remained mostly civil in public, even after Geri split from the group.
• Broken Base: The single "Holler" from the much maligned third album. Some call Fanon Discontinuity on it, as it's more R&B than their other albums, and others found the blatant sexuality of it amusing rather than sexy - while also finding it to be too generic sounding. Others however, find it nice and catchy, and consider it the best song off Forever. Others also like it as one of the few songs where Victoria gets to sing more.
• Fanon Discontinuity: The album Forever. As many fans would rather have "Goodbye", to been their last single, given the title and the fact that Geri had left the band, and the song being a tribute to her. The band's lack of success with Forever, the fact that Geri is not on the album, and its generic style means it is an easy album to ignore. Melanie C would later say that even though the Spice Girls went on to do this album after Geri left the band, the Spice Girls were never truly the Spice Girls without her, and the day she left was what really marked the end of the group.
• Fan Nickname: Although Geri's official nickname was "Ginger Spice", another nickname fans had for her was "Sexy Spice" which will get used if her hair is blonde.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: This advert for Walkers Crisps has the girls unsuccessfully hitting on footballer Gary Linekar. Victoria would have much better luck in that department when she met David Beckham.
• LGBT Fanbase: The girls have a huge gay male following. They acknowledged this by changing a line in "2 Become 1" (Any deal that we endeavour/Boys and girls feel good together) to avoid excluding their gay fans (Once again if we endeavour/Love will bring us back together).
• Les Yay:
  • The girls did a lot of hugging and kissing of each other, even away from the cameras. The music video to their hit "Wannabe" even featured Geri squeezing Emma's butt.
  • In 2019, Mel B revealed on Piers Morgan's Life Stories, that she and Geri had a one-night stand, much to the shock of Melanie C, who was in the audience. Geri denied it and the revelation caused tension to resurface for a while.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • In 2018 it became a meme to compare the Brexit situation to Geri's decision to leave the Spice Girls.
  • The chorus to "Wannabe" ("If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends") is used as part of a meme template, where the meme usually consists of replacing the "you gotta get with my friends" part with a list of the memer's flaws and issues, or their Single-Issue Wonk. A promotional image of the Spice Girls holding inflatable globes is often used for this, with the song's lyrics being edited over the globes (and with the last globe being where the punchline is written). Alternatively, "If you wanna be my lover" is in a caption above the image, and each globe has a different thing written on it.
• Narm Charm: Their Girl Power schtick veered into cheesy/gimmicky territory at times, but really, that's what a lot of people still love about them. You know, that and the impossibly catchy songs.
• Periphery Demographic: Yes, even straight men enjoyed the Spice Girls, although admittedly their being a collective Ms. Fanservice helped out with that too.
• Signature Song: "Wannabe" is clearly this, as it was one of the biggest hits of The '90s, and by far their biggest hit as a group. As for additional signature songs, "Say You'll Be There", "2 Become 1", "Who Do You Think You Are", "Spice Up Your Life", and "Stop" could all be argued as this. "Spice Up Your Life" in particular became so legendary in the UK that a good part of the population knows all the lyrics by heart. All of their singles, bar "Stop" (which peaked at #2) and their 2007 reunion single "Headlines" (#11), reached #1 on the UK charts, though "Stop" is probably more remembered than a few of their #1s.
• Special Effect Failure: At the end of the “Viva Forever” music video, the boy throws the toy capsule up into the gumball machine. It reaches a height above the dispenser, and then lands in it even though it has a metal roof above it that reaches further than the bottom of the dispenser.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "Last Time Lover" sounds similar to The Mary Jane Girls' "All Night Long."
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Many fans were left disappointed at their New Sound Album Forever in which they ditched their iconic bubblegum pop sound to a more R&B sound.
• Values Dissonance: The line "Yellow man in Timbuktu" was removed from "Spice Up Your Life" for the 2019 tour when they realised it wasn't acceptable anymore.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Seriously, they were marketed to (and incredibly popular with) preteen girls, but most of their songs were very thinly veiled metaphors for sex. The line "I really, really, really wanna zig-a-zig-ahh" in "Wannabe" is often thought to be a reference to some form of a sexual activity. They take it further in songs like "2 Become 1" ("Be a little bit wiser, baby. Put it on." - "It" being a condom, and ya know, the title of the song has enough sexual implication in and of itself.), "Naked", which is about a girl choosing to lose her virginity, and "Holler".
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The song "Two Become One" is about sex pure and simple with the chorus going "I wanna make love to you baby" and the line "Be a little bit wiser, baby/Put it on, put it on" which could only be about a condom (not to mention this line is made to rhyme with "get it on, get it on"). Imagine a slumber party of 6-10 year old girls dancing around and singing those lyrics. Then there's "Holler" which contains lyrics about "fantasy rooms" and "start from the bottom and work your way up slowly". Then of course if you take the basic premise of five girls in Stripperiffic outfits posing provocatively, you may be alarmed at the fact that little girls looked up to them. It was nonetheless marketed to little girls with oodles of merchandising.

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