The Spice Girls' "The Singles Collection" lands today, thirty years to the week after "Spice" came out, per Universal Music. It is 14 CDs, 160 tracks, four unreleased songs, and a booklet with messages from all five members, packed into a white handbag-inspired box.
A handbag box. Not a box with a handbag on it. The box is a handbag. The packaging is a fashion item now. The box is doing more Victoria Beckham work than the music.
Repackage math. I'm naming it. Thirty years. Zero new hits. The vault has been combed. The four "unreleased" tracks include "Do You Think About Me," one of the earliest recordings in the archive, and the rest are demos. The next truly unreleased Spice Girl is probably a studio outtake that was cut because it was bad, and the label decided the world needed it more than it needed silence.
One hundred sixty tracks. The singles. The B-sides. The rare remixes. The remixes of the B-sides, if the track count is to be believed. At some point a box set stops being a collection and becomes a warehouse, and the word "definitive" does the heavy lifting on the back of the box.
You don't open this thing. You hang it in the closet. That is the business model. Nostalgia with a strap.
YOUR TURN: would you hang a handbag full of 1996 in your closet, or is that exactly what the box was designed to do to you?
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