“And How Political is Their Notorious ‘Girl Power’?”: Kathy Acker’s 1997 Spice Girls Profile

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Fifty-second street. West Side, New York City. Hell’s Kitchen – one of those areas into which no one would once have walked unless loaded. Guns or drugs or both. But now it has been gentrified: the beautiful people have won. A man in middle-aged-rocker uniform, tight black jeans and nondescript T-shirt, lets Nigel, the photographer, and me through the studio doorway; then a chipmunk-sort-of-guy in shorts, with a Buddha tattooed on one of his arms, greets us warmly. This is Muff, the band’s publicity officer. We’re about to meet the Girls.

Even though I’m unsure the exact chronology of her work, Kathy Acker died on November 30th, 1997, meaning that the issue of Vogue with her profile of the Spice Girls as the cover story, which came out in January of 1998, must have been one of the last things she published. Anna Wintour said she wasn’t proud of the decision to put the group on the cover of her magazine, but there it is nice to think that maybe one or two Spice Girls fans picked up that issue, saw the name of the author, and maybe decided to pick up some of her books.

The whole thing is up for you to read at the Creatures of Comfort Tumblr,

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