Wannabe (song) - Writing and Inspiration

Writing and Inspiration

The first song the Spice Girls wrote with Stannard and Rowe was called "Feed Your Love", a slow and soulful song that was recorded and mastered for the group's debut album; the song was not used because it was considered too rude for the target audience. The group next proposed to write a track with an uptempo rhythm. Rowe set up a drum loop on his MPC3000 drum machine. Its fast rhythm made Stannard remember the scene where John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John perform "You're the One That I Want" in Grease. The group added their own contributions to the song, Rowe recalls:

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 with all these sections of chanting, rapping and singing, which we recorded all higgledy-piggledy. And then we just sewed it together. It was rather like the way we'd been working on the dance remixes we'd been doing before. Kind of a cut-and-paste method.

"Wannabe" was written in thirty minutes—mainly because the group had written parts of the song beforehand—in what Brown describes as a "sudden creative frenzy". During the session, Brown and Bunton came up with the idea of including a rap near the end of the song. At this point the group got very motivated, and incorporated the word "zigazig-ha" into the lyrics. Chisholm told Billboard magazine: "You know when you're in a gang and you're having a laugh and you make up silly words? Well we were having a giggle and we made up this silly word, zigazig-ha. And we were in the studio and it all came together in this song".