The Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” isn’t exactly the deepest track. It’s cheeky “girl power” fun with declarations about friendship and slamming your body down. In the original music video, the lasses party-crash and make merry. However, a new take on “Wannabe” is giving the song a more serious message. In this 2016 adaptation, what women “really really really” want is to “end violence against girls,” to “end child marriage,” and “equal pay for equal work.” You know, stuff like that.
Directed by M.J. Delaney and starring South African rapper Gigi Lamayne and Bollywood actress Jacqueline Fernandez, among others, the video from Richard Curtis’ Project Everyone is part of the U.N.’s Global Goals campaign. (It has its very own hashtag if you’re so inclined.) “The Spice Girls were about a group of different women joining together and being stronger through that bond,” Delaney told The Guardian. “These differences are what we want to celebrate in this film, while showing there are some universal things that all girls, everywhere, really, really want.”
Per The Guardian, Posh approves. Victoria Beckham said she thinks the video is “a wonderful idea” and said: “How fabulous it is that after 20 years the legacy of the Spice Girls’ girl power is being used to encourage and empower a whole new generation?”