I like to explore coincidences. I believe the connections between seemingly accidental occurrences say something important and can be understood 'scientifically.' Here scientific can be understood a few ways.
It can be rationalist. As Guattari points out in some lecture somewhere, Freud believed all things, including coincidences - which Mark Fisher points out in his book The Weird and the Eerie are part of what Freud called the 'uncanny' - could be traced back to purely rational causes and effects within a mechanistic world. As Guattari puts it, for Freud even the irrational is just the rational waiting to be uncovered.
It can be transcendental. In his book on Synchronicity, Jung attempts to 'scientifically' research uncanny coincidences, claiming - and this is roughly speaking as here is not the place to get into Jung - that coincidences are resonances between instantiations of deep historical archetypes. For Jung, the rational is just the irrational waiting to be explored.
It can be hyperstitional. A hyperstition is a fiction that makes itself real, or a coincidence intensifier. The rational and the irrational bleed together; the distinction collapses (or, when one arrives at a certain point of time, one looks back and sees the distinction between the two was never that hard, never 'really' there...).
It can also be semiotic, which I believe synthesizes the Freudian rationalist and Jungian transcendent approach with the Landian CCRU approach. Language as a system of arbitrary symbols in relation to other arbitrary symbols that still makes things happen - a kind of functional fiction - does not need to map onto any concrete objects or reality in order to fall into meaningful patterns. There are finite amounts of symbols within a finite system of organization that is further finitely reduced, both intentionally and accidentally, by human utility and preference and inhuman incentives, etc. Within limited options, trends catch on, certain words, phrases, spread like a plague. Coincidences intensify, an impersonal cultural unconscious takes shape as a subject, or more accurately an assemblage of enunciation, and this assemblage reproduces the semiotic material, etc. Words, floating in thin air, connecting to each other, take on a reality of their own, then a body in real time makes it real. Fictions become real.
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One such set of semiotic coincidences occurs via the assemblage known as The Spice Girls, the British pop band of the late 90s.
Consider the lyrics of their hit Stop off the 1997 album Spiceworld.
When I first listened to the song with my girlfriend I made the joke that the Spice Girls were merely covering the Pink Floyd song Stop off 1982 album The Wall.
This is obviously not true as the only similarities between the 3 minute and 33 second song - yes, 3:33 as seen int he above video, I am not making this up - and the 30 second Floyd track which is 3rd from last on the album is its title, Stop.
However, while listening to the song, I noticed that not only does the song share a name with a Pink Floyd song, but it mentions two other Pink Floyd songs not only in the lyrics but in the same sentence -'Hey you, always on the run.' Hey You, slow opiate ballad off The Wall, and On The Run, intense modular synth loop-collage off The Dark Side of the Moon.
These coincidences could be easily overlooked if not for another layer: the Spice Girls movie, Spice World (1997), contains several cameos from American celebrities such as Meatloaf and Elvis Costello, but also British musicians and celebrities such as Elton John, Roger Moore, and Bob Geldof. It is the last name here that interests us - Bob Geldof played Pink in the film adaption of Pink Floyd's the Wall.
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| Bob as an unhinged Pink (or MFW I start connecting all the dots between Spice Girls and Pink Floyd) |
To sum so far - the Spice Girls include references to two songs off The Wall and one song off The Dark Side of the Moon in a song on the album that shares a name and release date with the movie where the girls run into Bob Geldof, i.e., Pink.
This connection is evident in the culture at large. One music blogger connects Pink Floyd and The Spice Girls disjunctively, that is, through a negative associative link. For him, Pink Floyd is good music, no personality, whereas The Spice Girls is good personality, bad music. Why his mind went to this comparison first, we don't know. Why he made this dichotomy a thing, we don't know. We can only speculate it is because of unconscious semiotic and cultural connections.
Consider the following.
A website that tracks and provides crossword search clues states the following "Clue: Title of songs by Pink Floyd and the Spice Girls. Possible Answers: Stop." What this tells us is that somewhere, at sometime, there was a crossword puzzle in some kind of mass produced literature, be it a magazine, newspaper, puzzle book, etc., that also made the simple, obvious connection I've made above. In other words, the Pink Floyd-Spice Girls connection is basically common knowledge given that the crossword is a very simple puzzle distributed to the masses.
Similarly, UK News Outlet The Daily Mail wrote a short piece on Spice Girl Mel wearing a Pink Floyd T-Shirt. The shirt, as the images in the article show, is adorned with a popular graphic design from The Wall.
A Google search of 'Spice Girls Pink Floyd' yields, several pages in, a very interesting Spice Girls fan blog entitled 'Spice Bricks: The Geri Years Revisited.' The reference here is to the phrase 'Spare Bricks' - also the name of the URL and webpage despite the blog being entitled Spice instead of Spare - which is an unreleased Pink Floyd album composed of songs from The Wall that were re-recorded for the movie and padded with newer songs related to The Wall narrative, songs that would later go on to be re-written and included in the last Roger Waters era Floyd album The Final Cut. Though the sidebar of the strange, skeletal blog contains many links to other parts of the blog that sound intentionally Floydian - KAOS Theories, a reference to Roger Water's second solo album Radio KAOS (which is full of accelerationist themes, I might add), Floydian Places, Gilmoure Guitars, etc. - all the links are broken, which is not surprising given it appears the blog has not been updated for 20 years.
The subtitle of the blog here - The Geri Years Revisited - warrants attention as well. This is a nod to the split(s) that occurred to Pink Floyd throughout the years. The early years saw the band centered around Syd Barett who wrote the majority of the tunes. Then David Gilmoure replaced Barett making Waters as the main writer. Later, Waters would take over the band and eventually have a falling out leading to two Pink Floyds touring at the same time, one lead by Gilmoure one by Waters (syzygic Floyds) . 'The Waters Years' then refers to specific albums towards the end of Pink Floyd's career as a complete band, albums with a specific sound and message - Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall, and the Final Cut. As one Guardian article on Pink Floyd notes, the Spice Girls and Pink Floyd share some similarities, specifically around this Geri/Waters years:
"OK, so the subject of The Spice Girls On Trial (Five) is a different kind of deal, but maybe there is some common ground: internal bickering (Geri's defection mirrors Waters'), reconciliation and a comeback (even if after only five minutes). Something else, too: it's very hard to dislike the Spice Girls."Coincidences? Perhaps.
Let's go further still.
The production company that produced and helped write the single Stop also produced Geri's - the Roger Water's of the spice girls - debut solo album, Schizophonic. We should pause over this name. Not only is the album notably associated with schizophrenia, the 'diagnosis' of accelerationism, what Syd Barrett induced in himself through psychedelics, but it's also a concept - the separation of sound from its source thus creating an uncanny effect - Mark Fisher discusses twice in The Weird and the Eerie, the book we mentioned earlier in relation to Freud's uncanny. That's right folks, we've just come full circle. Though Geri most likely used the term to reference her split (schiz = split or cut) from the Spice Girls and her attempt to forge a new sound (phonics), the double meaning and the coincidence can't be ignored.
A final interesting coincidence. According to multiple sources (1 and 2), in the 90s The Spice Girls were hard-line Thatcherites. Thatcher is a fun link here because it gives us three directions to go in.: Nick Land's post-CCRU accelerationist conceptualizations are often accused of being Thatcherite or Reaganite in nature, Fisher, what I consider Land's friendly antithesis, was adamantly critical of Thatcher, while Pink Floyd's The Final Cut, basically an extension of The Wall, is centered on the Falkland War and polemically refers to Thatcher as 'Maggie' throughout the album. Fisher, Land, Spice Girls, Pink Floyd - the whole gang's here.
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One could argue that these similarities are merely the result of overlapping populations and identities - British musicians or theorists interested in music (CCRU-Kode9/Jungle connection, AUDINT, etc.) coexisting at a certain time, in a certain political climate, etc. This is both very much to the point and also far too naive. Yes, there's a 'geist,' yes bodies are dispersed across time that act as nodes for channeling outside forces, but why these specific resonances?
I will end without answering this question but instead doing a bit of what Freud cautioned against, and which he accused Jung of - wild analysis.
I believe The Spice Girls are a soft psyop, a vessel for a virus. As I have pointed out elsewhere regarding memes, viruses, Moldbug, Land, and the methods of political communication in our contemporary age, a viral memetic vessel makes itself just specific to resonate with the particular, i.e. find a first host, and just general enough to apply to the universal, i.e. spread, adapt, grow, transform, etc. The Spice Girls, from their cookie cutter multiculturalism song 'Spice up Your Life' that falls somewhere between tone deaf woke and flat out racist (a song which features a music video set in what appears to be a bland, monolithic dystopian future) or what we might call the 'cultural appropriation' of hiphop in their hit song Wannabe, to the girl power motifs juxtaposed (or intensified to their limit...) with the Thatcherism, one wonders if The Spice Girls where not engineered by a team of market gurus.
This, after all, the basic plot of the Spice Girls film, Spiceworld. The film, in a very meta and self-aware fashion very fit for the late 90s, centers on the girls who must expose their record exec's evil exploitative plot in order to reclaim their art and reunify as a band. That is, the movie plays on the fact that The Spice Girls are a pop sensation likely engineered by a record company to manipulate the masses. In this way it hides in plain sight.
This is what leads me to claim that The Spice Girls were a simulation of what British marketing execs believed the British general population believed the British marketing execs believed about the British gen pop. Or, in other less convoluted words, the subjective reflexive game theory of the marketing exec imaging what the consumer thinks of him (the exec) thinking of the consumer.
Ultimately this is not to say we shouldn't enjoy the Spice Girls. There are a number of songs I unironically listen to - 2 Become 1, for example. This is rather to say that when one goes looking, coincidences interlock and create something interesting and previously unheard of. So, listen to the Spice Girls and see where it gets you.
