I remember the summer of 1996, at a drunken wedding with one of my professors, a Hendrix-freak baby boomer, when he was complaining about the 'bullet-in-the-head rock and roll' the kids were listening to today, and he asked Renee, 'What does rock and roll have today that it didn't have in the sixties?' Renee said, 'Tits', which in retrospect strikes me as not a bad one-word off-the-dome answer at all. The nineties fad for indie rock overlapped precisely with the nineties fad for feminism. The idea of a pop culture that was pro-girl, or even just not anti-girl - that was a 1990s mainstream dream, rather than a 1980s or 2000s one, and it was real for a while. Music was not just part of it but leading the way - hard to believe, hard even to remember. But some of us do.