Geri at Forty-One

I was one of millions of teenage boys who jerked off to Geri Halliwell’s It’s Raining Men video—five minutes and six seconds of pure conditioning. Not proud of it, but it happened. I loved her the way you love a fleeting one-night stand, the kind you see on the street years later and pretend not to recognize. The memory’s better than the person ever was.

Now she’s forty-one and back with a new single called Half Of Me. The song is terrible. The video is worse. It’s the kind of awful that makes you desperate to look away but somehow unable to. She’s not the girl in that old video anymore, which is fine—nobody stays twenty-five—but she’s not anything else either. Just here. Making music no one asked for, like she owes it to herself or to us or to that version of her that used to matter.

The gap between then and now feels bigger than it should. Not because she’s older, but because getting older without becoming anything interesting just reads as defeat.