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"Wannabe" is a song by the British pop group Spice Girls, released as their debut single, and widely considered to be their signature song. It was written by the Spice Girls, Richard Stannard and Matt Rowe for the group's debut album Spice (see 1996 in music)./n"Wannabe" is an uptempo pop song with a touch of white hip-hop, rap and dance music; the lyrics are a demand of sincerity, with a feminist message of choosing friends over relationships, the song became an iconic symbolism of female empowerment and the most emblematic song of the Girl Power philosophy. Despite receiving mixed reviews from music critics, the song won Best British-Written Single at the 1997 Ivor Novello Awards and Best Single at the 1997 BRIT Awards./nThe single was released in July 1996 in the United Kingdom, reaching the top of the UK Singles Chart for seven consecutive weeks, and received a platinum certification by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). In January 1997 the song was released in the United States topping the Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks, becoming their only number-one single in that country./nBy the end of 1996 it had topped the charts in 22 nations, and by March 1997 this number had climbed to 31, before it became the best-selling single by a female group in the history of recorded sound, selling over six million copies worldwide./n"Wannabe" was co-written by the Spice Girls, Richard Stannard and Matt Rowe. Stannard and Rowe also co-produced the track. The song's central emphasis is the union and solidarity of friends, an implicit challenge to any "wannabe" lovers./nStannard and Rowe began writing with the group in January 1995, and the first song they wrote was called "Feed Your Love", a slow, soulful song which was eventually recorded and mastered for the Spice album – but not used because it was considered "too rude" for their target audience. Having completed that one, the girls wanted to write something a bit more uptempo./nRowe set up a drum loop on his MPC 3000 drum machine, which was quite fast but also had a strutting quality about it. For Stannard the rhythm brought to mind the spirit of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John performing "You're the One That I Want" in Grease. Then the girls added their own contributions into the mix./nRowe commented: "They made all these different bits up, not thinking in terms of verse, chorus, bridge or what was going to go where, just coming up all these sections of chanting, rapping and singing. And then we just sewed it together."/nHalliwell wrote in the group's first official book Girl Power! that Melanie Brown and Emma Bunton came up with the song's chorus, and was in that moment that they realised they had something good./nThe group and the producers were working all week on the song, but only half was completed by Friday night, so it was decided to finish it the following week. According to Victoria Beckham's autobiography Learning to Fly, that week she traveled to Torquay to attend the wedding of a friend of her then boyfriend Mark Wood; she communicated with the other girls with a cellphone she and Halliwell recently bought; even though Beckham wrote: "It's not the same thing by phone". The song was finished and by the time they were going to record it, every solo part was already divided between the four girls. Beckham only participates during the chorus of the song./nWhile other tracks on the album each required two or three weeks of studio time, the group was able to record "Wannabe" in under an hour – mainly because they had already written parts of the song beforehand./nThe song won International Hit Of The Year and Best British-Written Single at the 1997 Ivor Novello Awards presented by the British Academy of Composers and Songwriters. It also won Best Single at the 1997 BRIT Awards./n"Wannabe" received mixed reviews from music critics. Allmusic's reviewer Stephen Thomas Erlewine said "none of the Girls have great voices, but they do exude personality and charisma, which is what drives bouncy dance-pop like 'Wannabe', with its ridiculous 'zig-a-zig-ahhh' hook, into pure pop guilty pleasure"./nChristina Kelly from Rolling Stone called the Spice Girls "another bubblegum pop group that offer a watered-down mix of hip-hop and cheesy pop balladry, brought together by a manager with a marketing concept", adding "Spice Girls' idea of power seems to be flaunting that they are all that, but the lyrics make Alanis Morissette's sound like Patti Smith's. A few nuggets: 'If you want to get with me, better make it fast...' Despite their pro-woman posing, the Girls don't get bogged down by anything deeper than mugging for promo shots and giving out tips on getting boys in bed." In a poll conducted by the magazine to identify the ten most annoying songs, this song was ranked eighth./nMatt Diehl from Entertainment Weekly also noticed the combination of genres describing "Wannabe" as "more a compendium of music styles (from ABBA-style choruses to unconvincing hip hop) than an actual song", but added that "there's something endearing about this goofily formulaic Euro pop"./nSputnikmusic in a review for Spice called the lyrics "dire" and wondered "how could parents feed this to their 10-year-olds? The album's lyrics are so heavily laden with smut, I'm surprised they even let their kids have the album" and then used "Wannabe" as an example saying "The gist of the song is basically get your act together and treat me right, or there's no show. Not to mention the famous zig-a-zig-ha... try replacing it with the word 'sex' in the lyrics and see how it all suddenly makes perfect sense", adding "this track is built around an infectious keyboard riff, and so profoundly annoying, you'll want to rip your toenails off just so it will stop. But it's also really catchy, which makes you hate it even more." Another review from "Sputnikmusic" said "The lively bubble-gum pop of the Spice Girls embodied a gender not willing to lie down, and their debut single "Wannabe" acted as a proverbial kick in the pants for male chauvinists worldwide."/nIn The Simpsons episode "Maximum Homerdrive", Homer plays the song in the truck and refers to it as the ultimate truck-driver song. Homer sings the song in the episode "Fraudcast News" when the power was cut off by Mr. Burns and he uses the batteries "that have to power everything" in their house to play this song on the radio. "Ralph Wiggum also sang the opening lines of the song in the season 20 episode How The Test Was Done. The song was also used in The O.C. episode "The Case of the Franks", in the episode "Stand Up And Holler" of the CBS crime drama Cold Case, and in the finale of the fourth season of One Tree Hill. In 2007, online voters rated "Wannabe" #33 on VH1's list of "The 100 Greatest Songs of the '90s".

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