There was a dreadful, dreadful moment two weeks ago. Friday evening. Top Of The Pops. Jo Whiley's presenting - you know, Britpop-blonde, presents The Evening Session, looks like a meerkat wearing lipstick. We've just "come out" of the Top Ten rundown - Cornershop, Space , Aqua. There's a tiny pause. Jo says: "And with Celine Dion, the Spice Girls and Madonna there, this week's the first time in ten years that the Top Three's been all-female." Ten years? Ten actual years? Not dog years, or goldfish or mayfly years, but human ones? What kind of insane world is this, where 52 per cent of the population can only clutter up the Top Three once a decade? At a time when The Future Is Female, and little kids are shouting "Girl Power!" on the streets (even though they don't know what it means, and would just as happily shout "Nuclear Power!" "John Power!" or "Puppy Power!" - catchphrase from The New Adventures of Scooby Doo), this is woeful. And more prosaically: what a massive, filthily lucrative market to be completely ignored. Chicks have both money and ears. Why aren't women - artists and audiences - grabbing their half of the Pop Pie? The answer was provided by the following week's Top Of The Pops - which is, big-questions-answered-wise, rapidly turning into the I Ching of the 20th century. Run-DMC vs Jason Nevins's thrilling It's Like That is the new No 1. The video is shown - an empty NY loft in which 12 girls and 12 boys conduct the war of the sexes through the medium of breakdancing and spinning on their heads.

 

Ten minutes after Top Of The Pops ends, my sister calls. "Did you see the girls on that video?" Big pause. "They were really normal. They didn't have any make-up on. Big baggy trousers and frizzy hair; and one of them was really round. I don't think I've ever seen anyone like that on Top Of The Pops before." Another pause. "They looked SO COOL!" Over the next three days, every single one of my female friends echoes this sentiment - one black friend says it's reminiscent of the 1960s when, if anyone black appeared on TV, even for a second, it was so rare that her mother would scream "ONE OF US ON TV!" and the whole family would pelt into the front room to watch. She adds that she feels slightly giddy that we're behaving the same way about normal, real-looking women in 1998. The music industry overlord for Women In Pop clearly ran out of fax paper while being faxed Some Vital Points About Art. Point 3 - "Remember, Art should reflect reality for girls as well as boys" - is still stuck somewhere in the buffer. While Jarvis Cocker, Shaun Ryder, Bryan Adams, Thom Yorke and Tjinder from Cornershop happily represent all facets of male psyche, experience and appearance, I've yet to see a foppish, lardy, pockmarked, boss-eyed Asian girl playing filthy hip-hop prog-disco anywhere near my HMV. Alas for rock'n'roll - every medium is moulded by the mores rampant in the age of its invention, and pop still has its Fifties ethos attached to "womenfolk". Pop chicks in the 1990s are completely unchanged from those in the 1950s - LeAnn Rimes is Helen Shapiro, and M People's Heather Small merely a bawling Ethel Merman in drag. How could any woman who read Bridget Jones Diary and worshipped Anna in This Life relate to them? Since it is becoming embarrassingly clear that the music industry has fallen behind even ITV in its showing of women as anything other than clean, smiling, pliant, air-brushed anorexic FHM fodder (Vanessa Feltz and Prisoner Cell Block H span more feminine diversity than All Saints, Cleopatra and Kylie put together), some small acknowledgement had to be made. This is why the Spice Girls, for all their continuation of the marketing of women as ciphers, made such a splash. The Blonde, the Slut, the Amazon and the sultry extra from Robert Palmer's Addicted To Love video were all present and inevitable; but the Spice Girls expanded the Allowable Female Chart Repertoire by one: the astonishing New Invention of a Sporty Woman! We've never had a Sporty Woman before. In female pop terms, Sporty Spice is on a par with Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. What pathos! What a tragedy for womankind that a tracksuit should mean so much! Please, dear and benevolent God, let the Spice Girls work on A&R men in the same way that our Drug Tsar believes marijuana to. High on "soft" stuff like Girl Power and its enormous lucrativeness, they could start longing for something a bit harder - a bit of Kristin Hersh, say; a Björk for the weekend. In a year's time they'll be caught up in the spiral: hooked on fierce stuff like Patti Smith, pushing Courtney Love to the public to pay for it, and as desperate as we are for a regular supply of real women.

 

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