It’s hard to believe, but The Spice Girls’ debut album, Spice, turns 20 this month. It was the bestselling album of 1997, shifting an astonishing 19 million units within a year of its release. No act was bigger than The Spice Girls that year.
During that initial wave of Spice-mania and girl power, Stefani Germanotta would have been an impressionable 10-year-old Catholic kid growing up in Manhattan. Her own pop career as Lady Gaga was still a decade away. By the time “2 Become 1,” the third single from Spice, dropped in America in the summer of 1997, Germanotta was on the cusp of enrolling in an all-girls Catholic school called Convent Of The Sacred Heart. Did the Spice Girls’ secular music breach its walls? Probably. A delightful new Instagram video shows Gaga dueting on “2 Become 1” with Baby Spice herself, Emma Bunton.
The meeting seems to have been unplanned, a fortuitous aligning of the pop stars. Gaga, fresh from releasing her first solo single since 2013, stopped by BBC Radio 1 studios in London recently for an interview. Bunton just happened to be nearby, and this impromptu cover was the charming result. Gaga clearly knows the song by heart. One can easily imagine her singing it into a hairbrush while dreaming of pop stardom. Now she gets to sing it directly into Bunton’s ear. The former Baby Spice giggles a bit at the song’s unabashed intimacy (“I’ll make love to ya, baby!”), but the moment is still incredibly sweet. As much as she projects a larger-than-life image, Gaga is still a fangirl at heart.
[via The Daily Dot]