Cute Band Alert

How Sassy magazine created a new sex object.

by Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer

"Why are New Kids on the Block so Famous?," pondered Christina Kelly in Sassy, the genre-breaking teen magazine, of the hair-gelled fivesome that, back in the late 80s, grinned lustily from the pages of MTV, Seventeen and every other adolescent rag. "Me and my friends refuse to accept that New Kids on the Block, wholesome pop demons that they are, should be allowed to live," she announced, in her trademark darkly comic style. Christina — everyone used their first names in Sassy — goes on to bitch that the band is prefab and that their music is "watered-down pop." She wonders, "What's so great about five guys who don't write most of their songs, who don't play any instruments on their albums, who've performed to recorded tracks, who wear what I consider daggy clothes, who dance in unison and" — italics the magazine's — "who aren't even that cute."

Don't let Christina's daggy use of the word daggy distract you: The publication of "Why are New Kids on the Block so Famous?" is a seminal event in the history of sex education. Who but Sassy was going to tell girls that the pablum being served up to them by the rest of the press actually sucked? The Sassy staff had other idea of what their sophisticated teenage readers — yes, they thought teenage girls were sophisticated — should be lusting after. In fact, the magazine almost single-handedly shifted the paradigm of what kind of guys a teen girl should be hot for. (Okay, they got a little help from Cameron Crowe.)

Teen magazines have always existed to proscribe suitable parent- and teacher-approved cultural interests to their pubescent audience. From 1945 and into the 1990s, Seventeen was the grande dame of teen publications. It was essentially an etiquette guide for the all-American girl, doling out no-nonsense advice on appearances and relationships in between fawning celebrity profiles, home decorating how-tos, and a parade of Nordic-looking models. Its owner, Walter Annenberg — a Nancy Reagan crony and millionaire with a gold-plated toilet seat in his private plane — called it "a national trust."

In fact, Seventeen practically invented the teenager as a category that could be marketed to. It touted parentally-approved entertainment in parentally clueless language. Witness: "It's the underage rage these days as adult dance clubs open their doors to the under-twenty-one crowd. Fruit juice flows and the music pounds as the younger generation rules the night!" The magazine was most American girls' first piece of direct mail; 50% of them received it, and it was rumored that many of these subscriptions were bought by parents or — even worse — grandparents. As such, its tastes were oppressively mass, with requisite stories on Top-Forty favorites like mall queen Tiffany and hair band Nelson. The magazine rarely sexualized its featured musical acts, preferring to cover them in a detached, blandly optimistic, journalistic fashion.

In 1988, the fearlessly feminist Sassy debuted and reinvented what passes for teen culture. There were a few things that made Sassy different from Seventeen and its downmarket copycat competition, YM and Teen. It was based on the Australian magazine Dolly, which had the highest per capita readership of a teen magazine in the world and was known for its sexual frankness and first person journalism. Unlike the editor-in-chief of Seventeen — who was in her 60s and an ex-nun — Sassy's editor-in-chief, Jane Pratt, was a twenty-four-year-old Oberlin grad with a nose ring who was best friends with REM's Michael Stipe. The rest of the staff was also really young — many just a few years out of college — so they were still tied to that community and were reared on influential 1980s college radio. And instead of the faux-hip language that Seventeen used, Sassy used the colloquial language that sounded the way kids really spoke: The beauty column was called "Zits and Stuff" and the religious right almost bankrupted the magazine when Sassy dared to use the words "blow job" instead of "oral sex." What all of these elements amounted to is that Sassy had a different kind of authority than the other teen magazines — that of a cool older sister rather than a parent.

In the beginning, the musical acts that Sassy featured weren't all that different from the competition's, but its coverage of them was. Sassy wasn't afraid to say that rock stars were sexy. In the second issue, for example, there's an article called "Dating a Rock Star," in which writer Karen Catchpole says, "You'd probably think you had died and gone to stereo heaven if you were passionate with Prince or had Bono for a boyfriend. Boy, have I got news for you." The piece was filled with sexual innuendo, telling girls that dates get squeezed in between concerts, groupie competition is hard to deal with, and that rock stars are not only flabby from all that junk food they eat on the tour bus, but that ninety percent of them are short.

Sassy never succumbed to the PR machine that powered most magazines' entertainment pages. Instead, the magazine's music coverage featured music the staff thought girls should know about that were too obscure for the cursory coverage of the other teen magazines. So, Christina's interest in Olympia, Washington, and Washington D.C. translated into endless stories on riot grrrl, K Records, and Fugazi. Jane's friendship with Michael Stipe resulted in lots of fawning profiles of his band (and free REM flexidiscs). Kim France, now the editor-in-chief of Lucky, joined the staff in 1990; she was a big fan of rap, so the magazine started having more hip-hop coverage. No doubt she was influenced by her then-boyfriend, Charles Aaron, now an editor at Spin, who held a notoriously ambiguous gofer-type position as Staff Boy.

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 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 Caufiled-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.

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 had championed had broken through to mainstream charts or been signed to major labels. 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 check points and expect any would-be girlfriends to study up in order to really understand them.