Vanilla: A Foul Taste

Girlbands and boybands owned the pop scene in the nineties. It’s a fact. It was a decade where the Spice Girls, All Saints, B*Witched, Backstreet Boys, 5ive and a slew of others reigned supreme over a global army of teeny boppers. However it was inevitable that not all of these four-to-five piece pop products would be able to hit the mark. For every worldwide mega-success, like the Spice Girls, there had to be a mega-bomb of epic proportions.

Enter… Vanilla.

‘Vanilla’: “…vanilla (pronounced vah-NIHL-uh) is an adjective meaning plain or basic. The unfeatured version of a product is sometimes referred to as the vanilla version.” Boring? Conventional? Forgettable maybe? That would have been a blessing. But those of us who have experienced Vanilla know that they were none of these things. What they were, was a dark stain on nineties music.

A British girl band who formed in 1997, Vanilla were another all singing, all dancing quartet of hotties. Oh, except they couldn’t sing, couldn’t dance, and weren’t remotely attractive. Their debut single “No Way, No Way”, is a regular on ‘worst songs of all time’ lists and tops my own personal list. The song goes something like ‘No way, no way! Munumanah, not today, don’t get fresh with me!' Not just content to make ‘not good’ music, they really pushed the envelope to create ‘bad’ music. The song had cheap-sounding production, meaningless lyrics and sadly lacked the vocal chops to make up for these problems. The music video gives an added dimension of pain to the song. In it we see the four, let’s say ‘casual’, looking members of Vanilla wandering around a public pool. In the words of Karen Walker (Will & Grace): “I can't believe I'm at a public pool. Why doesn't somebody just pee directly on me? Indeed. The setting, their clothes, makeup, choreography, and expression all just serve to make a bad thing worse. The end product is so bad that you could easily confuse it as some kind of satirical send-up of just how bad the nineties girlband could be. I understand that there are many aspects to an artist: the lyrics, the vocals, the image, the personality – any pop act can succeed if it does one of these things well enough. But what Vanilla and “No Way, No Way” represented was a failure on every level.

Yet astonishingly the song still reached #14 in the UK music charts. Those people responsible are probably the same people who, eight years later, got the Crazy Frog to number one in six different countries. Vanilla’s short-lived experience of mediocre, undeserved chart success seems proof enough that music really must come down to taste. Some people saw something in them. Like their producers, who obviously had enough faith in them to not bother with trappings like a vocal coach or a stylist.

Despite this idea of ‘music as a matter of taste’, I stand by the opinion that Vanilla are an injustice to pop music in the nineties. It isn’t just that they weren’t brilliant; it’s that they effortlessly exceeded expectations of what a bad pop song could be.