I was crying when I left the theater after seeing “All Over Me,” the Sichel Sisters film about 15-year-old best friends Claude and Ellen who grow up and apart in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. When I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was desperate to own the soundtrack, but I didn’t have any money — I had to borrow money from my boyfriend just to buy my morning coffee. But I had to have it, so I raided my closet, stuffed a bag full of clothes, sold them to a second-hand store and bought it. Now I’m listening to it and crying again.

No other collection of songs has ever expressed the poignant agonies and sheer rage of girlhood like this. In these songs is the sharp, self-pitying nihilism of girls sitting in their bedrooms and slitting their wrists, the dull ache of having sex with someone who couldn’t care less about you, and then the joy — the liberating, screaming joy — of an experience like walking into a punk club for the first time and finding it full of girls exactly like you. Both the film and the music perfectly capture the highly pitched passion and symbiotic bonds between teenage best friends and the searing pain that comes from their dissolution.

Leisha Hailey, one half of the rainbow-haired duo the Murmurs, plays Lucy, Claude’s love interest, and the song the Murmurs contribute to the soundtrack is its most devastating. Anyone who remembers the Murmurs from their catchy but slight 1995 mini-hit “You Suck” will be surprised by the soulfulness and ragged sadness on “Squeezebox Days.” Heather Grody sings in a high, raw voice over a brooding, melodic guitar, “I don’t care if you don’t know me/And I don’t even care if you don’t like me/Can’t we just spend the night together/So I’ll have something to think about tomorrow.”

Contrasting the Murmurs’ lovely fatalism is Sleater-Kinney’s driving, harmonic punk. “I Want to Be Your Joey Ramone,” with its half-ironic refrain, “I’m the queen of rock ‘n’ roll,” bursts with so much desire and ambition it could propel a girl right through her miserable adolescence. In the juxtaposition of these two songs is the possibility of redemption — a banal idea, maybe, but thank God these bands take it seriously, because it’s also a life-changing one.

There are a few male-fronted bands among the album’s 20 tracks, and even a ’70s disco song by Bee-Gees rip-off artists the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. But it’s the women, from Patti Smith to Ani DiFranco, who make the album so brilliant. “Claude has done her homework,” said director Alex Sichel, “she’s researched the girl rocker thing. In a way, the soundtrack tells the history of righteous girl music, which is Claude’s music.”

Because music is so integral to Claude and Ellen’s life, music supervisor Bill Coleman had a chance to assemble brilliant female musicians without having to force them under any particular genre umbrella. Too often, “women in rock” compilations stereotype women singers as folky earth-mothers or tattooed wild women. But this album doesn’t need a thesis — it’s just girls and their guitars.

Almost every song on this album owes its existence to Patti Smith, whose poster hangs over Claude’s bed. On “Pissing in a River,” her voice is so huge and deep that she encompasses and embodies two generations of female longing.

Originally, Alex Sichel had planned the film as a documentary about the riot grrl movement, and the scene pervades the soundtrack. Babes In Toyland open the album with the haunting “Hello,” full of guitar wails and girlish whispers that turn into growls. Helium’s “Hole in the Ground” is in the same vein: thick, feedback-laden and simmering. Ultimately, though, the musical world that serves as the milieu of “All Over Me” is unified less by style than by its smoldering emotional intensity. DiFranco is frequently labeled a folk singer, and her music is sharp and clear instead of fuzzy and distorted, but her bittersweet “Shy” fits easily into the scene that the soundtrack evokes. So does the slow, twangy lament “Superglider,” by Drugstore, a band that sounds a lot like Mazzy Star.

If you leave the CD playing for a few minutes after the last song,
a bonus track comes on, a heartbreaking little ballad that sums up
the entire album with the refrain, “you make me feel so fucking
real.” A trite sentiment, to be sure, but it’s one that cracks with
emotion. If only I’d had this CD when I was 15.

There’s something a little desperate in the incoherence of Cyndi Lauper’s new album, “Sisters of Avalon.” The ’80′s icon seems to be flailing in her search for an updated identity, careening from trip-hop grooves to throaty punk to folky lite-rock. She’s even hired the producer from Tricky’s debut album to create a contemporary vibe.

But Lauper’s not enough of a chameleon to pull off an album this eclectic. When she tries to do soul anthems like the title track and “The Ballad of Cleo and Joe,” she gets dangerously close to self-parody — as if Duran Duran had made a hip-hop record. “The Ballad of Cleo and Joe” is a house track about blue-collar nightclub love that has Lauper trying to summon the gritty pathos of Donna Summer on “She Works Hard For Her Money.” But Lauper’s voice is suited to punk, not funk. That’s why the diva power vocals she has backing her on the insufferable “Sisters of Avalon” sound so absurd. When she sang “Girls Just Want To Have Fun,” it was easy to picture the new wave nymphs she was singing about. But here, when she says, “Come on sisters,” it’s hard to see who she could be talking to.

these days, all things Japanese carry a hip kitsch cachet, from Hello Kitty and Speed Racer to the charming, delicious Shonen Knife. There’s an element of ingenuous sincerity to these pop culture exports that can’t be duplicated among sarcasm-sick American bands, which is why no one comes close to Shonen Knife for pure cotton-candy punk exhilaration.

Naoko Yamano, her sister Atsuko Yamano and Michie Nakatani have figured out that their American fame comes from their kooky, gushing femininity, and they play it up on their first album in three years, “Brand New Knife.” Whether you call it regression or reclamation, for the past few years the underground has been filled with bratty little girls refusing to grow up. Part of the popularity of Japanese anime cartoons comes from their wide-eyed child-women. Shonen Knife helped start the mania for twisted Japanese cuteness, and, though they’ve been joined by bands like Pizzicato Five and Cibo Matto, they’re still working it with songs about Twister, Barbie dolls and fruit.

The soundtrack to Richard Linklater’s film “Suburbia” is music for losers, brimming with the kind of teenage pathos that makes failure and rejection seem vaguely romantic  which is not necessarily a bad thing. Based on the play by Eric Bogosian, “Suburbia” is the story of five kids still stuck in their hometown wasteland a year after their high school graduation.

By making the soundtrack to his character’s lives so compelling, Linklater gives them an antihero dignity that they don’t have in Bogosian’s play. He could just as easily have used their music to mock them, ` la “Welcome to the Dollhouse” or “Beavis and Butt-head.” Instead, he gives them the kind of songs that suburban kids everywhere dream are written just for them, the best parts of the soundtrack capturing the desire to just get out.

eighteen years after the New York Times settled a legendary sex
discrimination case, the old gray lady is still clueless about girls.
Last Sunday’s Magazine, “Heroine Worship,” had promise. A radiant
preteen girl graced the cover, wearing a T-shirt sporting a list of famous
women. A caption stretching across the page explained what was up:
“Inventing an identity in the age of female icons. A special issue.”
Unfortunately, though, this special issue won’t provide much help to
anyone trying to navigate their way through a postmodern girlhood. Instead,
it’s devoted to female “icons”  or, at least, to those women the
Times has designated as such.
“An icon is a human sound bite, an individual reduced to a name, a face
and an idea,” explains Holly Brubach, the magazine’s style editor. It’s a
sad attempt to put a new spin on the old idea of fame. In an essay
apparently designed to rationalize the whole weird venture, Brubach
describes the power such icons ostensibly wield. “About to move on to the
next century, we call on various aspects of them as we reconfigure our
lives,” she writes, “deciding which aspects of ourselves we want to take
with us and which aspects we want to leave behind.” It’s as if building an
identity were as simple as putting together an ensemble at Macy’s or
ordering dinner at a sushi bar.
What is most dispiriting, though, is the paucity of choices. Of the few
articles about contemporary women, two are about models and the third is
about Playboy-Playmate-turned-MTV-dating-show-host Jenny McCarthy. We also
get the rest of the usual suspects  Madonna and Oprah, as well as Martha
Stewart. (Writer Patricia McLaughlin defends the domestic goddess, claiming
that we despise her not for her cloying domesticity, but because “hating Martha
Stewart is safer than hating your whole life.”)
The whole issue exudes a kind of retro sensibility that wouldn’t be
entirely out of place in Esquire. In “Virgin Territory,” John Tierney tries
to link a nightclub promoter’s corralling of models to the mythical power
of the virgin. “‘Virginal’ might not be the first word associated with
today’s models, but there actually is a certain purity to their cultists’
devotion,” he writes. “Doormen and bouncers at clubs have the same mission
as guards at the Temple of Vesta: to ward off lustful males.” In the end,
though, the only power Tierney ascribes to models is the power to “put a
smile on his face.” Or, more likely, a pistol in his pocket.
Though the magazine cloaks itself in the fashionable notion of girly
empowerment, it never gets any further than this in examining the
relationship between women and the emaciated ideal. In his model
article, Village Voice columnist Guy Trebay rattles off a list of facts
about Naomi Campbell. Some of them, like the tidbit about Campbell getting
her start in Boy George’s “I’ll tumble 4 ya” video, are interesting. None
are enlightening. Trebay’s only point seems to be that he can recite
obscure facts about Campbell off the top of his head. He asks, “Does this
mean, I wonder, that we’ve reached a critical stage in celebrity
pollution?” Or does it mean that Trebay has too much free time on his
hands?
Premiere writer Rachel Abramowitz’s profile of McCarthy, who
until recently hosted MTV’s “Singled Out,” is similarly unenlightening.
Abramowitz seems to think that merely describing capitalism at work 
like a dutiful student in Cultural Studies 101  counts as a kind of
critique. “No, she’s not just another blond bimbo with a big smile,”
Abramowitz writes. “She’s a cash machine.” Apparently, cash machines are
big with the girls of today: “She professes not to care how others see her,
and therein lies her appeal as a Generation X icon: she has no seeming
allegiances to anything greater than the spirit of Jenny.”
Well, more power to her. But the New York Times should know better than
to attempt to wrap this sub-People fare in a “feminist” package.
Ironically, though the editors purport to be reporting on those idolized by
the culture, the heroines that many girls really doworship 
women from singer Ani Difranco to rapper-turned-actress Queen Latifah 
don’t get a mention. Musicians, of course, are the ultimate icons to the
young, but the only rock star profiled in the magazine is Tina Turner. Instead of Patti Smith, we get Patsy Kline.
The contributors tend to justify their selections with vapid aphorisms.
“What is the difference between a literary icon and an ordinary writer?”
Cynthia Ozick plaintively asks. “The writer is sometimes read, the icon
almost never.” Is this really true? What about the male writer-icons, from
James Joyce to Jack Kerouac, whose works are devoured by their disciples?
Never mind. Women are about image, not substance.
Some of the Times’ contributors are openly hostile to their subjects
 and to those who appreciate them. Dan Hofstadter’s profile of Frida
Kahlo is more insulting than informative. “Kahlo’s worldwide constituency
is composed not only of Mexicans and other Latinos but also of art
students, leftists, feminists, the genuinely ill, the merely miserable,”
Hofstadter glibly opines  transforming Kahlo from an icon of
artistic suffering into one of mediocre degeneracy.
Old movie stars (from Audrey Hepburn to Mae West), get a little more
respect  as does Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, after reading Brenda
Maddox’s profile of the Iron Lady, someone who had never seen a picture of
Thatcher might come to believe that she was some sort of British Evita.
Maddox quotes Francois Mitterrand: “Ms. Thatcher has the eyes of Caligula
and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.”
To whom is this bland smorgasbord of possibilities supposed to appeal?
As Brubach explains, “Kate Axelrod, the 11-year old on our cover, stands
not only for the girls of her generation, whose identities are in the
formative stages, but for women of all ages, who tend to regard themselves
as works in progress.”
Apparently, then, the “icon” for womankind is a child.