If 1993's entertainment poll was any indication, Sassy's indie tyranny was rubbing off on its readers. The poll, which is printed on a Pearl Jam centerfold — a band both staff and readers voted as one of the best of the year — opens with a typical bossy diatribe about proper taste from Christina. "For the first time, the readers' responses were very similar to ours. I don't know if that means we've finally beaten you guys into submission or if it's part of the whole alternative-is-mainstream thing. But I hope this reduces some of the tension between us and you guys." It's not surprising that girls who had been hangin' tough for the New Kids just a few years before were now mesmerized by Eddie Vedder's dirty curls and socially conscious rock. By this time, many underground bands Sassy championed had broken through to the mainstream. And many girls had seen Say Anything and Singles, Cameron Crowe's twin odes to the sensitive boy.

The mythical sensitive boy! How Sassy loved the idea of him! He was the kind to court you with mix tapes. He had a subscription to the Sub Pop Singles Club. He not only edited a zine, but he had The Beauty Myth on his bookshelf. There was just one problem. Indie bands were arguably aesthetically superior, but they were also, stereotypically, patently desexualized. When Guided By Voices were picked as Cute Band Alert, Christina made sure to point out that they were not that cute (and they were, in fact, photographed with their backs to the camera), but Sassy's readers were encouraged to like them nonetheless because they make music "that sounds like the Beatles, kind of, but with weird lyrics." The group of paunchy, middle-aged Ohio bedroom rockers had zero prefabricated teen appeal, but girls were supposed to like them nonetheless because their music was good for them. Guided by Voices was no Nelson, Color Me Badd, Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, or New Kids whose songs "After the Rain," "I Want to Sex You Up," "Good Vibrations," and "Step by Step" were all about catering to the hormones of a teen girl. The songs are about her, each boy's look was all about appealing to her, and even their interviews were about pandering to her tastes.

By celebrating the neutered early-'90s indie rocker, did Sassy support its readers' pursuit of a futile sexual goal? "These guys are scared to death of girls underneath it all," writes Sassy staff writer Margie Ingalls in a February 1994 story entitled "The Tormented Boy: An Ethnological Study." The story was a reworking of a teen-magazine staple. Seventeen's 1988 "boy guide" included such types as "The Intellectual," "The Rebel" and "Captain America." Sassy, on the other hand, created new categories, because a new type of guy was the object of their readers' love and lust. Their postmodern archetypes included the Disaffected Writer Boy, the Renegade Skater Boy and, of course, the Soulful Musician Boy, who, we are told, hangs out in suburban garages and pawnshops selling vintage amps. His mating call is "So, uh, are you going to the Fugazi show?" His mating ritual: "Strums guitar and raspily sings a lovely (or deliberately not-lovely) song written just for you."

Sassy had plastered Kurt and Courtney on one issue with the coverline, "Ain't Love Grand?" Inside, Kurt dreamily mused that Courtney's zits were beauty marks. But their relationship was no barometer of emotional health, and Sassy's readers seemed grateful that the magazine was finally coming clean that courting an indie-rock boy was not without its faults. "Not three days after my boyfriend broke up with me, I received my February Sassy," one reader writes. "He is the soulful musician boy to a T! I was totally the strong woman who he said he loved but couldn't commit to."

Encouraging impressionable teen girls to crush out on guys who couldn't commit, who were sad and wanted you to cheer them up all the time, and who only really loved you if you understood his references to Rickenbacker guitars and Steady Diet of Nothing: Thanks a lot, Sassy.

A casualty of myriad forces, the magazine folded in late 1994. Now, more than a decade later, it's clear that for teen girls, Sassy helped mainstream the indie guy, making him a new classic archetype to lust after. And former Sassy readers who came of age in the alternative-as-mainstream '90s are still hankering for the indie rock boy to this day — just look at the music coverage in women's magazines such as Jane, Bust and Nylon.

The past few years have seen a triumph of the sensitive rocker in pop-culture targeted towards teen girls, from emo heartthrobs like Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy and Conor Oberst to Coldplay's Chris Martin to The OC's Seth Cohen, who, on one memorable episode, gave his two girlfriends identical "Starter Packs," which contained CDs from Death Cab for Cutie, Bright Eyes and the Shins, plus copies of Kavalier and Clay and The Goonies. Therein lies a problem: indie boys have kept all their relatively esoteric cultural checkpoints and expect any would-be girlfriends to study up in order to really understand them.

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