In February 1990, Christina launched the semi-sarcastic, semi-serious "Cute Band Alert" in her taste-making column, "What Now," because, in her words, "everyone needs someone to objectify." The first entry was Bullet LaVolta. Soon, publicists and band members alike started lobbying Christina to be featured. In fact, the alumni list of "Cute Band Alert" reads like an encyclopedia entry for '90s alternative music: Soul Asylum, Blonde Redhead, Chavez, Unrest, Sloan, Ween and That Dog. It is also the place that massively successful and notorious indie bands like Guided By Voices, John Spencer Blues Explosion and Superchunk got their first piece of teen press. The staff devoted entire features to Sonic Youth and the Ramones, and there was an infamous cover story on Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. Covering bands geared toward the college crowd gave the magazine indie cred — something previously unheard-of for the teen market. And it made Sassy one of the first nonmusic magazines covering underground music.

The magazine fetishized not just indie-rock music, but the boys who created it. At Sassy, the editors' musical tastes very clearly stood in for their sexual preferences — hence the names of the magazine's columns, "Cute Band Alert" and "Dear Boy." And these sexual predilections were passed along to their readers. Not only was Sassy encouraging girls to listen to these bands, but they were encouraging its young readers to take down the posters of Color Me Badd and Kriss Kross and start lusting after Dave Pirner, John Spencer or Paul Westerberg instead. All of these guys were cute, no doubt, but their lankiness and scuffed Chuck Taylors (not to mention moodiness or possible drug predilections) didn't exactly make for typical teen-heartthrob territory.

Sassy's first male cover (above); not even coverage of River Phoenix succumbed to gushing.

Sassy's boosterism of the indie male continued in "Dear Boy," where readers sent in their relationship questions for a famous guy to answer. The column, which was launched in 1993, allowed Sassy to give yet more face time to cute rock stars like Beck, Mike D., Billy Corgan, and Iggy Pop, while attempting to demystify boys for its readers. The questions were typical teen traumarama territory, such as: "There's this guy that I really like. He tells everyone that he doesn't even like me as a friend, but when we're alone together we do things that are reserved for people who think of each other as more than friends. What do I do?" The rock stars got to show a softer side with their answers. Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth replied to the aforementioned question by saying, "The guy's a jerk. I know that won't discourage you from liking him, but he's got a major personality flaw: disrespecting you. Next time you're alone with him and he tries to get 'friendly,' tell him your friend Thurston Moore wants to kick his ass. And then tell him why."

As Sassy got more popular, YM counterattacked, hiring the now-infamous editor-in-chief of Star magazine, Bonnie Fuller, whose mandate to the staff was, as one former staff member remembers, "boys, hair, clothes" and whose covers frequently depicted the likes of a shirtless Marky Mark with a halter-top-wearing model, the top button of her Express jeans suggestively undone. Sassy, on the other hand, had the disembodied head of Evan Dando of the Lemonheads at the end of each article in the August 1992 issue. The April 1994 issue has a review of the zine "Die Evan Dando, Die" in which Christina writes, "Hey Mr. Zine-Boy, Evan is famous and loved by women and you're not! Ha ha ha ha ha!"

Clearly, editors at both magazines reveled in boy craziness, but one celebrated sensitive, Holden Caulfield-esque types, while the other touted beefy dudes. This was partly because Sassy championed a girl who was diametrically opposed to the YM or even Seventeen girl. Sassy touted a liberated spirituality with a gospel of doing it yourself and thinking for yourself, which was very much in keeping with the indie rock ethos.

In Sassy, though, boy-craziness and self-reliance coexisted; it's not like the magazine taught girls to sit at home and wait for their crush to put down his guitar and pick up the phone. The magazine was a huge proponent of girls DIY'ing their music. In articles like "Kicking Out the Jams," on how to start a band, profiles of Simple Machines label owner Jenny Toomey, and their in-depth coverage of riot grrrl, Sassy spread the idea that girls could — and should — start their own bands regardless of musicianship, which was a new concept for many of Sassy's teen readers. With all of this talk of self-reliance in music, they were telling girls to become their own rock stars, put out their own records, and play their own guitar solos — they might as well have said "masturbate." The magazine didn't focus entirely on worshipping the artistic male — though one wonders if at least some of the talk of starting a band was a sly way to get closer to boys in bands. It worked for Sassy staffer Jessica Vitkus, who met her husband while she was the bassist in the Sassy in-house band Chia Pet.

It's also worth noting that Sassy's coverage of hip-hop, however, was markedly different from its coverage of alternative culture. Though one reader invoked the n-word when she complained that the magazine spent too much time talking about rap and using hip-hop lingo, in fact, the magazine's coverage of this musical genre was pretty PC and cursory in comparison to its indie rock coverage. There was a February 1991 article called "Dance Like This" that taught readers to do Yo! MTV Raps-style moves and a story called "A Tribe Called Quest: Nice Guys, Deep Down." Perhaps the title wasn't meant to have racial implications, but it can certainly be read that way, since it assumes that readers may not think the band members are nice. It certainly didn't sexualize them — because nice middle-class white girls like the editors and their readers didn't — or shouldn't — get hot for big, black guys.