Media diary – week 6

Guilty Pleasures

As much as I don’t want to admit this, for as long as I can remember, I have had an embarrassing obsession with the spice girls… when I was 7 or 8, my mum was having a clear out of all her old videos, and she found the video recording of the spice girls concert live in Istanbul. As awkward and embarrassing as this is, every night without fail until I was about 10, I would watch this video recording of the concert and backstage footage and interviews. To this day I still know every lyric and dance move to all of their songs. Eventually I grew out of this phase, mainly due to embarrassment but partially due to the fact that DVDs came into fashion and my trusty video player broke, so I had no way of watching my beloved spice girls video.  But last Christmas, my childhood obsession returned, as on Christmas day, I opened a present which became my favourite one that year despite getting an iPhone… I’m sure you can guess what it was! A DVD version of the concert! I actually can’t believe that I’m writing about this, I can feel myself going red…

The general target audience would be mostly people who were fans of the Spice Girls during their rise to becoming Britain’s number one girl band, or people like me who were brought up in a very musical family and were influenced by the music around them. This isn’t a media text that I would usually consume as the spice girls haven’t been making music for some time now, and they are not seen as being popular in the current music charts. The style of music that is popular now, is not the same as what was popular in the 90’s, as music has changed. Although my music taste is completely different to the spice girls, I have to admit, I do have their albums hidden away on my phone.

Seeing as I have consumed this media text from a very young age, and considering the way in which I responded to it, I think that it is safe to say that I have taken the preferred reading to the text. The DVD’s main purpose was to provide the audience with a positive insight into the 5 girl’s life and make it easier to view them as being regular people as well as being famous.