Moo's Review of Grade 9 Music Class: What Do You Mean You Don't Like S Club Seven?!

I remember the days when I used to like things unironically. One of the things I liked unironically was S Club Seven. If you weren't a tween circa 2000 you likely don't know what an S Club Seven is. S Club Seven was a super happy and poppy British teen band. Their music was like sunshine and rainbows and eating five packets of Pop Rocks at once. And yours truly who was 13 at the time, ate it right up.

Everybody from S Club Seven looked tanned and the girls wore tube tops and platforms. They had lyrics like “S-Club”, and “Hey”, and “There ain't no party like an S-Club party” and I loved it. I understood it. In fact, it was one of the few things that I understood on absolute terms with no vagueness. To an ESL kid, that was a huge deal. I learned all the S Club lyrics and sang them constantly. And I begged my mom to pick up tube tops and platforms at Walmart so I could look like Hanna and Tina and Jo. They were gonna be my ticket to being cool! So it shocked me to no end when I discovered that S Club Seven was not cool. In fact, it was the furthest thing away from cool there was.

The music my classmates listened to included The Clash and Nirvana. Which is a tad pretentious if you ask me. Because none of them were born during the time The Clash was big. And when Nirvana was big, they were 5. I don't mean to diss Nirvana, but to my fresh out of ESL little kid ear, Nirvana sounded like a bunch of metal plates crashing into each-other. I did not grow up on alternative music. The music I grew up on in mainland China all sounded like national anthems. S Club Seven was punk rock to me.

I didn't know WHY anybody didn't like S Club Seven. Their music was nothing but things that made you happy! They danced! They sang on beaches! And they were being requested every 10 minutes on the most popular radio station, KiSS 92 FM! Back in China, if something was requested on the radio, that means EVERYBODY liked it. What do you mean, you like different stuff? How did you even get it if it's not being played on the radio? And why is something playing on the radio constantly if nobody likes it? I wanted to know!

When I put on S Club Seven as part of a music show-and-tell, instead of cheers like I thought I'd get, I got nothing. Just blank stares. Even after I had laboriously written the lyrics on the black board, “Don't stop! Never give up! Hold your head high and reach the top!” My classmates just stared at it with zero expression. That was when I started to develop a vaguely antagonistic relationship with them. “I know you Canadian kids secretly like this stuff. You're just pretending.” We had our cultural differences, but come on! Not a single person in my grade 9 music class liked S Club Seven? And they all uniformly thought it was the lamest thing to exist on planet earth? That's gotta be some bull.

Also, they're not all innocent little white kids like my parents thought they were. I saw Dick Junior touch Stephanie E's boob at recess.