Women On The Verge: At The End Of The '90s, A Few Artists Set The Stage For A New Era

On July 30, as part of our series Turning the Tables, NPR Music published a list of the 200 greatest songs made by women and non-binary musicians who debuted on or after Jan. 1, 2000. Today, Ann Powers examines that list's immediate forebears: artists whose careers began in the late 1990s but whose influence carried well into the 21st century.

Here's a bit of historical hindsight: The millennium bug was real, it just didn't hit the way we thought it would. Anyone who was already staring at a screen in 1999 remembers the quiet panic over whether a "Y2K" computer glitch would derail the world's data-driven infrastructure systems. That didn't happen; the canned food filling doomsayers' remodeled bomb shelters presumably was thrown into casseroles for the next family holiday. Something did shift, though, in the early months of the year 2000. It happened on the pop charts: the twelve-week reign of Carlos Santana's "Smooth," featuring the suave, mumbled cat-calling of late-'90s rock heartthrob Rob Thomas, finally gave way beneath the force of Christina Aguilera's "What a Girl Wants."

"What a Girl Wants" is a power ballad deeply emblematic of the Y2K moment, when old forms of expression were being reshaped by the young generation immersed in the emerging era's fundamental restructuring of social and neural networks. On one hand, Aguilera's manifesto is old-fashioned: She fortified her teen pop with 1960s soul inflections, and the song's