It's a Girl Thing...

Don't ask how I got into look at this - but I stumbled across a MySpace profile (http://www.myspace.com/girlthing) last week for a band that has long since been defunct. Officially, the band 'Girl Thing' split in 2000 after one top ten single, and a half-arsed album release and lost millions of $$ for their record company RCA. The marketing was slick, albeit fairly generic and a repetative of the Spice Girl formula, but the second single off the album crashed and burned and RCA cut their losses and run while they still had some shreds of dignity left.


Girl Thing: Tanked

The interesting thing is how, 6 years on, the marketing machine still appears to be running for a product that has lost all of its wheels.

For a start, someone is still logging on - as the MySpace site records the last long in as today. Secondly, someone is still adding friends and until 2005, someone was writing blogs. Even other MySpacers are logging in and saying hello. The individual photos of band members all have dates of births attached to them.

Nostalgia perhaps? A crazy, obsessed fan? Maybe the writers of the songs use the site as a platform to demostrate their talents? But surely the marketing team can't be using this as testimonial?

But when you look through the blog, there's a great comment from someone who actually appeared to be behind the band - their vocal coach - who simply asks 'who set up this site'? Clearly those people close to the band have even less idea than anyone else.

The really amusing bits can be found when you read the 'biography' for the band. It may be tongue in cheek; they may mean this for real - but in the description of the band's sound, this phrase is immortal :

"The Girl Thing sound crossed a Betty Boo-meets-NWA rap-style with the incessant bounce of melodic dance pop."

Please, please let me be in the room when Betty Boo meets Dr.Dre, Ice Cube and the rest of NWA....posh Kensington, West London, meets Compton, downtown LA. Brilliant.