Clear Channel is destroying radio. At least, that's the popular mantra these days. Radio consolidation -- which shifted into high gear with the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and has been fostered by a pro-big-media majority at the Federal Communications Commission -- has resulted in the Wal-Martification of radio. Across the nation, stations are being gobbled up by huge chains like Clear Channel, which then monocrop their playlists. It's the same fifty mindless cookie-cutter songs played in an endless, soul-numbing loop, the same conservative talk shows, even the same deejays doing the same shows for simultaneous broadcast in a half-dozen markets nationwide. Jockeys are losing their jobs as the big chains consolidate and centralize their work forces. There, in the distance, is the faint swan song of independent radio. Abandon all hope, ye who flip thy radio dial.

That could be true; the recent ruling of the FCC to further deregulate the media, though now under challenge in Congress, is further evidence of the power of the media giants. But for the irrepressibly optimistic, there are beacons of hope: Dozens of independent and small-network stations are regularly whipping the Clear Channel rivals in their markets. If quirky, original, community-oriented music radio is dead, how do these tenacious little outfits keep beating Clear Channel and its ilk at their own game? And what can small-time stations and local radio networks learn from their examples?

Part of what separates these scrappy stations from the competition is a bet they're making that the big consolidators' fundamental philosophy -- that Americans only want to hear familiar music that doesn't challenge them -- is wrong and can't last. Ultimately, the bet goes, the listening public will tire of being underestimated and will seek out alternatives.

Singer-songwriter Dar Williams, who got her first big breaks from independent and college radio, will take that bet. She sticks with her independent label (Razor & Tie) despite overtures from the big boys, regularly plays benefits and fundraisers for independent stations, and has even written a song about the deejays who spoke to her from her childhood transistor radio. Williams regularly plugs local independents at her shows. "You can tell the ones that are getting it right. When I mention them from the stage, the audiences cheer for them," she says. "Those stations that have a very corporate way of doing things, they don't command that kind of allegiance. Those stations that allow themselves the flexibility to be genuinely involved in their communities, to play local artists and to respect their audiences -- that sows a vibrant kind of loyalty."

One Popular Pig

KPIG, near Santa Cruz, Calif., is one station already reaping the rewards of Clear Channel exhaustion. By its own admission, KPIG has one of the weakest signals in its market. Yet it consistently ranks in the top five against all formats in all demographics in its market, and first in the 25-54 demographic and in the Triple-A (adult album alternative) format. It has owned the ratings charts there for six years. What makes KPIG unique is that in an age of format consultants and universal playlists, live deejays at KPIG still pull records off the shelves and play practically whatever occurs to them, whenever they feel like it. They even answer the phone. This is old-school rock radio. "You scan the dial and you know when it's the PIG. You may not know the song, or even the artist. You know it's us because you've never heard it before and it's good," says program director Laura Hopper. "That's our strength. There is no one else like us out there."

Hopper has been with the station for all of its fourteen years, and through three ownership changes. "We have survived intact, which is a minor miracle," she says. The credit for the station's longevity goes in large part to its fiercely loyal listeners. Five years ago, then-new owners New Wave Broadcasting tried to switch the station's format to classic rock, air "canned" shows and pare down the staff. In a popular uprising Hopper dubbed "The Revolution," Santa Cruz residents stood on street corners handing out fliers of protest -- complete with New Wave executives' home phone numbers. New Wave backed down. "People consider KPIG a part of the community," says Hopper. "When you have that kind of loyalty, and ratings like ours, [the owners] are afraid to mess with you." The Chamber of Commerce in Santa Cruz includes KPIG in its tourist brochures of things to see and do (and hear) in the area.

KPIG is now owned by Mapleton Communications, which recently bought out New Wave. Mapleton owns more than a dozen stations in Central California. That's chicken feed compared with Clear Channel, which owns more than 1,200 stations, including seven in KPIG's market alone. Hopper says she feels relatively good about KPIG's future, despite the climate of deregulation and consolidation. But she does feel like she's always looking over her shoulder. "I'd be stupid not to look around and worry. My friends [in the industry] are clinging on desperately or gone."

Mom & Pop

WOXY near Cincinnati is an anachronism, inasmuch as it's quite literally a mom-and-pop operation in one of the biggest radio markets in the country. Doug and Linda Balogh have owned this indy modern-rock station since 1981. Doug Balogh says there are good reasons they have managed not only to stay alive but to thrive and even innovate in this era of bully megabroadcasters: They provide a real alternative in an increasingly uniform field of competitors.

WOXY is the last independently owned alternative radio station in a top-twenty-five market anywhere in the United States. It ranks near the middle in its market, according to the latest Arbitron ratings, but above at least three Clear Channel rivals. The only reason WOXY exists at all, says Balogh, is that he got in at the right time (before the Telecom Act of 1996), with what was then a completely new and original format -- modern rock. He also credits the family-business atmosphere he cultivates in the studio. "We all live in this community. There are real live people walking in our halls and answering our phones. We take pride in our product," he says.

Balogh doesn't worry about being forced out of business by Clear Channel, but he is bitter about consolidation. He says the real problem isn't the megabroadcasters so much as those in Congress who made them possible, and less visible monopolists like Arbitron, which audits radio audience share nationwide. Balogh questions whether Arbitron's measurement methods really reflect listening tastes. He contends that the rise in shock-jock radio is the result of brief, fleeting spikes in listenership in less-than-representative samples, and not of long-term consumer trends. "There used to be two constituencies in this business: advertisers and listeners. Now with this concentration there are three: Wall Street, stockholders and the fraction of 1 percent of the population who actually fill out [Arbitron listening] diaries."

Balogh is a technophile who recognized the potential of the Internet early. Now WOXY is streamed live on the Internet, and featured on proprietary services through contracts with AOL, Netscape and iTunes, a subsidiary of Apple Computer. It is currently the highest-rated modern-rock station on the Internet. WOXY is profitable, but Balogh isn't satisfied. He is writing a book titled Killing the American Dream, about how consolidation has eliminated the opportunity for any future entrepreneur to do what he has done at WOXY.

Going Public

Thanks to the few FCC regulations not yet pillaged by the current Administration, public radio is still the only permanent alternative to commercial-laden, variety-starved popular radio. For music lovers, the crown jewel of public radio is WNCW in Spindale, North Carolina, where in a single set you may hear Flatt and Scruggs followed by Jimi Hendrix followed by Edith Piaf followed by Omara Portuondo. Eclectic doesn't begin to describe it. The programmers at WNCW seemed like cultural geniuses two years ago, when the sleeper hit "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" spawned a smash, Grammy-winning soundtrack packed full of the same roots music -- primarily Americana and bluegrass -- that had been WNCW's staple for years. "We've been 'O Brother' forever," laughs recent program director Mark Keefe. "To us, Doc Watson is a cultural icon. Maybe to someone somewhere else, he's just some guy in the emergency room."

It's about celebrating diversity, says Keefe. His role was not to mollify his audience but to challenge it. And to be of service to the music itself. "I may not put Ibrahim Ferrer's new album in heavy rotation, but you can be damn sure I'm going to play it, because it broadens our listeners' horizons and our jocks' horizons, and it keeps music alive. The only way to keep music alive is to play it." Keefe is also unafraid to take chances, including risking offending the more conservative among his listeners. The week the war on Iraq began, Keefe had Dan Bern's "Talking Al Kida Blues" -- a song that could make the Dixie Chicks blush -- in heavy rotation. Let's not forget that an overzealous Clear Channel official circulated a list of more than 150 songs with "questionable" lyrics affiliates might have wanted to avoid playing immediately after September 11, most of them -- like Elton John's "Bennie and the Jets" -- a hundred times tamer than Bern's ditty.

But complaints at the more daring WNCW are few and kudos frequent. In the past six years, WNCW's listenership and budget have both doubled. Keefe estimated that he had a weekly total of 100,000 unique listeners over 12 (the biggest segment is males 40-45). The annual operating budget for the current year is a healthy $1 million -- 78 percent of it raised through membership drives and underwriting. Keefe says the station is consistently in the top ten in its market (by his estimation, the thirty-sixth-largest market in the country) and regularly beats commercial stations in various demographics and times throughout the week. WNCW is so successful, in fact, that the owner of a small chain of commercial stations based in Wilmington has just hired Keefe away from WNCW to recreate the magic further up the dial.

But WNCW is a rarity in public radio. Even on the left end of the dial, homogenization is a problem. Most public stations hew to three basic formats, or a combination thereof: news-talk (dominated in the extreme by National Public Radio programming), jazz and classical. And while in the news-talk segment NPR provides unquestionably more objective fare than programs offered by Clear Channel's Premier Radio Networks (which licenses Rush Limbaugh and Laura Schlessinger's shows, among others), it is also guilty of perpetuating the same type of uniformity that critics chastise Clear Channel for. So some who flee the sameness of corporate radio for public stations find themselves in a different kind of sameness. In some significant markets -- namely New York (WFUV), Philadelphia (WXPN), Los Angeles (KCRW) and Louisville (WFPK) -- program directors haved jettisoned most if not all of their NPR and jazz/classical programming for post-baby-boomer eclectic music programming and locally produced news.

Rita Houston, music director for New York City's WFUV, airs NPR news headlines but none of its longer programs. She says she believes there's room -- and even a civic need -- for public stations that aren't NPR clones. "NPR has grown so much as a brand that more Americans know what NPR is than know what Clear Channel is. Is that saturation creating a lack of regional access? Absolutely."

WNCW's signal reaches five different states and overlaps a half-dozen other public radio stations, all of which broadcast NPR programs during at least part of the day. Homogenization, even noncommercial homogenization, makes for boring radio, according to WNCW's Keefe. "In the narrowcast model, you can't break new artists," he says. "We played John Mayer and Jack Johnson, artists like that, long before they broke with big recording contracts and the marketing machines behind them. We're like, 'Why are people so surprised, wondering where they came from all of a sudden?'"

Not Waiting for Congress

There are indications of a changing tide in Congress. The FCC vote in June may have served as a kind of final straw. The struggle to persuade Michael Powell's commission to retain existing restrictions on ownership brought together an impressive -- if unlikely -- cast of media populists, from the National Organization for Women to the National Rifle Association. That caught the attention of lawmakers from both sides of the aisle. On July 23, the House voted overwhelmingly against Powell's effort to increase the number of television stations a single media company may own. But even if the Senate follows the House's lead, that action would address only one aspect of consolidation. (There are, however, some radio initiatives in early legislative stages.)

People like Keefe at WNCW suspect the public will demand better before the government gets around to mandating it. "What we do flies in the face of conventional wisdom about radio," he says. "We play the music they say nobody listens to, and yet we have a rabid audience that can't get enough of it. We are living proof that it really does work."

Rita Houston of New York's WFUV says that even if not all of these iconoclastic stations are clobbering Clear Channel, overall listening trends don't bode well for the corporate formulaic approach. Houston says listenership is up at WFUV, WNCW and comparable stations like WXPN in Philadelphia, even as overall radio audiences are shrinking. Arbitron confirms both trends. "We've been doing the same thing for the past ten years, and our numbers have always been healthy, but we have never seen numbers like the last couple of years," she says. While WFUV is not breathing down Clear Channel's neck in the country's biggest radio market, it is an oasis for the clonecast weary.

In this sense, Clear Channel's clone approach is the best thing that's happened to independent radio. "When the mainstream grows, the underground grows with it," says Houston. "People are getting tired of mainstream radio, and they find us," says Houston. "We call ourselves 'refugee radio,'" says Keefe. "A lot of our listeners come to us because they are so fed up with corporate radio in general. I've always said our slogan should be 'We remember to play what you forgot you liked.'" WOXY's Balogh has some advice to smaller stations that don't want to be swallowed up or squashed by the corporate radio giants: Recognize that you can't compete on the basis of money or marketing muscle. "Be original. If you're playing what everyone else is playing, you're vulnerable. Nothing's stopping anyone from flipping to the other guy."

Brooke Shelby Biggs, a journalist living in San Francisco, is the author of "Brave Hearts, Rebel Spirits: A Spiritual Activist's Handbook" (Anita Roddick Books).

Any man who has a 17,000-page FBI file must be doing something right.

John Trudell earned most of his voluminous record as a leading activist for Native American rights in the tumultuous 1970s, when the federal government was attempting to squelch the movement's newfound passion and power. Involved in the Indian takeover of Alcatraz in 1969, Trudell quickly became a charismatic leader of the struggle. By 1972, he was the national chairman of the American Indian Movement (AIM), which he guided for seven years, through the sieges at Pine Ridge and Wounded Knee.

During that time, the FBI kept a close eye on Trudell. An excerpt from his file, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act in 1986, reads:

"Trudell is an intelligent individual and eloquent speaker who has the ability to stimulate people into action. Trudell is a known hardliner who openly advocates and encourages the use of violence [i.e., armed self-defense] although he himself never becomes involved in the fighting ...Trudell has the ability to meet with a group of pacifists and in a short time have them yelling and screaming 'right-on!' In short, he is an extremely effective agitator."

One afternoon in 1979, Trudell stood on the steps of the FBI building in Washington DC, delivered a rousing and angry speech. He burned an American flag to protest the agency's persecution of AIM.

The next morning, Trudell's entire family was killed in a house fire on the Shoshone Paiute reservation in Nevada. The fire was officially ruled an accident, and never criminally investigated.

Trudell believes the fire was deliberately set (he says strangers had warned him on at least two occasions that his family was in danger if he didn't give up his political activity). He won't say whether he thinks the FBI was solely responsible, but says, "Minimally, the FBI, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs conspired to cover up who did it and why."

Since that day 23 years ago, Trudell has channeled his anger and his social consciousness into his art -- poetry, music and acting. His latest album, "Bone Days," is outspoken and raw. Reviewers usually say Trudell's work "defies categorization," and it's true: the album is an amalgam of blues fusion, slam poetry, political polemic and tribal chanting. Hard to say what section to head to in your local music store, unless yours happens to have a bin labeled Other.

Trudell knows that an album like "Bone Days" must have a new context in a post-9/11 culture.

"I called the album 'Bone Days' because these are hard times -- there's not much meat for the meat eaters, you know? Hard economically, emotionally, physically. People are struggling. Terrorism isn't new. This has been going on for a long time, it goes on everyday. People in this world live terrified lives. They are terrified about making their rent payment, about feeding their children. America has been suffering a kind of spiritual terrorism for a long time.

"Maybe it's the outrageousness of the act in New York that makes it stand out. But then I have to ask myself: How did America get to be America? It killed women and children. It slaughtered us. And now they cry terrorism, " he says.

Such bluntness is pure Trudell: the final track on "Bone Days" unapologetically compares Indians to Jesus on the cross.

Trudell sees the Sept. 11 attacks as a calculated conspiracy, not just by a small sect of radicals, but of the invisible hand of globalism gone astray.

"This issue reaches into the New World Order, the WTO, GATT and the whole globalization movement. People need to think clearly about what's behind this, what is motivating it. They cannot allow themselves to be blindly led. Because right now they are looking for a specific terrorist. But in five years down the road, unions will be considered terrorist organizations because they are a threat to the economic well-being of America.

"In order to make economic globalization work, to make this new form of democracy work, everything has to fall into place. And you have to have consistency. If we have international structures that infringe on the sovereignty of nations, you also have to have, within those nations, an inhibition of the sovereignty of individuals. Of course, this is nothing new for the Indians. The American masses are becoming the new Indians. I've been here before."

"Bone Days" was produced by actress Angelina Jolie, who heard about Trudell through her mother, the Canadian activist and former supermodel Marcheline Bertrand. Trudell had no recording label, and no money to record the songs he'd been working on for years.

Jolie's support of the project surprises Trudell as much as anyone.

"If you are religious, you might call it a fucking act of God. You know the story of Sitting Bull before Custer's last stand. Sitting Bull had a dream of soldiers falling out of the sky. Well, Angelina fell out of the sky for me, and it was good."

Trudell is now the cultural advisor for Jolie's latest project, the All Tribes Foundation. "Bone Days," meanwhile, is distributed on Indigo Girl Amy Ray's independent label Daemon Records and Trudell is on a tour behind the album benefiting community radio.

But Ray and Jolie are not the first mainstream celebrities to notice Trudell. Jackson Browne produced his first record back in the mid-1980s. Bob Dylan called Trudell's 1992 Rykodisc release "aka Graffiti Man" the best album of the year. Kris Kristofferson called Trudell "a crazy lone wolf, poet, prophet, preacher, warrior � Justice is a fire that burns inside him. His spirit cries out for it. It makes him dangerous."

Dylan introduced Trudell to George Harrison in the late 1980s, an association that led to Trudell's first movie role in the film, "Pow-Wow Highway, " which Harrison produced. Trudell has appeared in eight films so far, including "Thunderheart" and "Smoke Signals." He is currently filming a mini-series for ABC's Hallmark Hall of Fame based on the myths and stories of native peoples.

"Even younger activists who might not recognize his name know someone he has worked with, or touched in some way," says Amy Ray. "John has a way of looking at the world in this holistic way. He sees how everything connects to everything else, and he has such a mesmerizing way of expressing it."

But Trudell isn't signing up to be anyone's New Age guru. "I don't believe in hope," he says. "When I was a child I was taught the story of Pandora's box. The gods gave Pandora a box and told her not to open it because it contained the seven evils of the world. Of course, she opened the box. And out came the seven evils. But then Hope came out of the box, to help us deal with the evils.

"I always questioned that. The eighth thing to come out of that box was Hope. To me that meant that Hope was the eighth evil of the world. How come Hope didn't have its own box? What was it doing in a fucking box of evil?

"So I pray more and hope less. If you cling to hope, you sit and hope and you do nothing. It's like heroin. Praying and fighting and expressing -- that's doing something."

Brooke Shelby Biggs (brooke@anitaroddick.com) is a freelance writer and editor of AnitaRoddick.com.

Back in November 1999, Amy Ray told Girlfriends she would be working on a solo punk album in 2000 to be recorded on her 11-year-old Georgia-based indie label, daemon records. It didn't help my nerves that Ray was also talking about her new girlfriend and how she was considering settling down and starting a family. Of course, I was thinking: "Oh no, it's the lesbian equivalent of Yoko and John. God save the Indigo Girls."

I needn't have worried. Ray's solo album is out, the Indigo Girls are working on an acoustic album to be recorded this summer, and Ray is still baby-free. (She's also still with girlfriend Jennifer Baumgardner, a 30-year-old New Yorker who co-authored the recent overview of third-wave feminism, Manifesta. Sorry, girls.)

The new album, Stag, is a very lesbian record -- from the cover art of a butch/femme couple dancing, to the lyrics within. But the most interesting thing is the richness of the material, drawn from a tangle of genres: folk, rockabilly, punk, and riot grrl righteousness. Guest musicians include The Butchies, Luscious Jackson, some of Daemon's own bands (Rock*A*Teens and Mrs. Fun), and punk legend Joan Jett.

If you're expecting Stag to be a 10-song marathon of the angry thrash that was "Compromise" -- a song Ray wrote for Indigo's last studio album, Come on Now Social -- you'll be disappointed or pleasantly surprised, depending on your taste. The album is radical more for how it was made than how it sounds.

At its center, Stag is about values and politics, as is just about everything Ray does or says. And the freedom of going solo and working beneath the corporate radar seems to have calmed and focused this part-time Indigo.

I won't say 'so much for that; what do you do when it's done?' 'Cause I know we grow when it's over.

How was it for the 36-year-old Ray to write and record without using her Indigo Girls partner Emily Saliers as a sounding board and collaborator, as she has for 20 years?

"It was strange. I did try to keep it separate, but she would always ask how it was going, which was cool. And I'd tell her, 'I'm having trouble with this one thing,' and she would be supportive and sympathetic, but she didn't get involved in the specifics."

Saliers recently told Ray she loves Stag and has been playing it constantly. I can hear in Ray's voice the pleasure that idea gives her, and the mutual admiration that makes these two work together so well. Ray likens it to the early days of the Indigo Girls when they would record their own songs on cassettes and trade them. "We'd wear out each other's demos."

Says Saliers, "I love it. It's very raw and honest and emotional. I keep skipping around to a new favorite song. They stick in your head. Right now, I've got 'Late Bloom' in my head." "Late Bloom," evocative of early nineties Seattle grunge, isn't exactly an "Emily" song.

"Amy has really turned a corner in her songwriting on this album, but also on songs [from the last Indigo Girls' album] like 'Gone Again,' and even 'Go.' Those songs are really well constructed," said Saliers. "I'm really proud of her."

Ray says writing for her solo album was a new experience. "When I would be writing for an Indigo Girls album, I would be thinking about leaving space for harmonies or counter melodies, for Emily to come up with a riff, things like that. But there is a self-consciousness about the way I write for the Indigo Girls, that I can't put my finger on, that dilutes the intimacy. I need to be less self-conscious."

Going solo has helped. Although collaborating with Saliers is enjoyable, challenging, and productive, Ray says the relationship creates undeniable tensions -- who's playing or singing lead on a given tune, for example. "Writing for this album, I could be less like a dog on a chain. I didn't have to protect my territory."

The final product shows the differences in relief: Amy's voice and guitar are so prevalent, you hardly notice -- outside the obvious stylistic influences -- that anyone else of note is even on the album. "Unlike with Emily, the harmonies on this album are really just harmonies. I mean, it's strictly background."

And sometimes that's exactly what Ray needs. The punk rhythms stitched together by experienced punk babes like The Butchies' Kaia Wilson and Luscious Jackson's Kate Schellenbach are precisely what Amy's shrieks need to give them context. Who hasn't gone to an IG concert, seen Emily walk offstage to let Amy cut loose, and wondered, "Where did thatcome from?" Ray is obviously in her element free from the narrow confines of the Indigo identity, and it's a relief to hear.

Stagsounds unfinished, like a demo, or one of those session tapes that established artists put out to buy time between studio albums. But in Ray's case, that feel is exactly the point. The unfinished edges are part and parcel of the underground charm of indie music. Case in point: as soon as the Indigo Girls were signed and started producing their albums in state-of-the-art studios, critics were on them like vultures for selling out. In the punk world, if even one yuppie has heard of you, you lose your street cred.

The album works in part because Ray tried to preserve the raw, organic sound she and her collaborators achieved in the chilly basement studios where they put down the tracks. That was easy enough, since she was quickly running out of time and the $10,000 she'd allocated for the project.

"I put limits on myself financially, because it's just not fair to spend five times more on my record than we do for the other artists," she says. Daemon has put out albums for a raft of Southeastern bands, including lesbirock icons like the Ellen James Society (with Amy's ex, Cooper Seay) and Michelle Malone. Amy herself was born and raised outside of Atlanta and currently lives on a ranch in the country on the outskirts of nearby Athens, Georgia.

Ray says the production of Staghas taught her something about running an indie label. For once, she could see the process from the other side: as the musician instead of the CEO.

The time and financial limitations also helped Ray resist her tendency toward perfectionism. Still, she admits, she sometimes "fell back on an obsessive need to overthink a mix, or I mistakenly rerecorded songs. But the music that I kept coming back to was the music that came out unlabored and spontaneous and organically rebellious."

Lucy stoners don't need boners, ain't no man could ever own her; with the boys she had the nerve to give the girls what they deserve. -- "lucystoners" from Stag

There isplenty of identifiable, Clash-evoking punk rock on Stag,but there are also some of the most sensitive and gentle melodies, arrangements, and lyrics Ray has ever recorded. "Lazyboy," for example, could have been a Simon and Garfunkel song, with its whispered vocals and spare, single guitar. This is punk?

"Punk is as much an approach or philosophy as a musical style," Ray says. "Punk is a grass-roots movement; recording an album on an indie label for less than $10,000 is an implicitly political statement."

Whether Staggets high-profile press or succeeds commercially doesn't concern Ray much, although the better it sells the more profit she can reinvest in Daemon, a not-for-profit business. She says she already considers the album a personal success, simply because she finally did it.

The album's birthing process not only gave Ray the freedom to explore some of her own creativity which doesn't get airtime with the Indigo Girls, but also forced her to do some personal soul searching. "The songs on Stagdeal frankly with my confrontations with the oppressive elements of the music industry, my frustrations with imposed standards of gender all around us, and the shortcomings I see in myself."

As far as shortcomings go, Ray has always been frank about her musical ability. She once told a music industry magazine that when she and Saliers were playing coffeehouses in the early eighties, Emily would work on ever-more sophisticated chord changes and fingering, while she was practicing the same three chords. Recently, Ray has been pushing herself beyond her own perceived limitations.

"On this album, I wrote all the harmonies and I played lead guitar -- things I didn't know or maybe didn't believeI could do before," she said.

But the album's lyrics also have to do with other personal shortcomings Ray was feeling. "You know, the songs 'Hey Castrator' and 'Black Heart Today' -- they're about that solitude and doom that are important to me somehow."

"Hey Castrator" is bound to be misinterpreted as a man-hating dyke anthem. But it's really about Ray's struggles with her inner guy.

"I can sometimes identify with things our society sees as stereotypically male, the male part of myself," Ray said. "You know, when I would catch myself objectifying my girlfriend or leering at women on the street. I was offended by myself for relating to that kind of energy." That inner struggle, she says, is expressed in the song's haunting refrain: "Hey, castrator, take this strong out of me." (Strongrefers to aggressive or exploitative male energy.)

Still, there is a gut kinship Ray feels with her inner -- and, let's face it, outer -- masculinity. As she says in "Mountains of Glory," "I'm gonna miss being the boy, I'm gonna miss being the man." She adds with humor, "Of course, a small amount of objectification never hurt anyone. We all want to be objectified a little."

While conceiving Stag,Ray says she was frustrated by the sudden collapse of the riot grrl movement of a decade ago. Bikini Kill, Luscious Jackson, The Breeders, Team Dresch: they had all broken up and most had fallen off the radar. Not only was Ray feeling alienated from her masculine side, she was hungry for a woman-friendly arena she could funnel some creative expression into.

"I was feeling like I wanted that riot grrl sensibility back, and wondering where it had gone, that punk, tough, female energy. That energy that was tough, but not exploitative," she says.

To capture on tape the sound and sensibility she heard in her head, Ray drove around the Southeast with a guitar and amp in her trunk, hooking up with the famous and not-so-famous progenitors of the riot grrl movement in dingy, brick basements. A raw, powerful female sensibility informs the finished product, one that resonates with sexuality.

Janny Wenner, Janny Wenner, Rolling Stone's most fearless leader; gave the boys what they deserved, but with the girls he lost his nerve . . . . Testing 1, 2, 3, in the marketplace, it's just a demographic-based disgrace, and a stupid, secret whiteboy handshake that we1ll never be part of. -- "Lucystoners"

The most rebellious moment on Stag is the raucous "Lucystoners," in which Ray vents her frustrations with the corporate music industry. The lyrics castigate Rolling Stoneeditor Jann Wenner -- who, it's worth noting, is gay -- for his complicity in the music industry's institutionalization of sexism and homophobia.

The title "Lucystoners" comes from Lucy Stoner:a woman who doesn't take her husband's name, from the 19th-century feminist Lucy Stone, the first woman to keep her maiden name after marriage. Back in the Bikini Kill era of riot grrl punk, there was a band named the Lucy Stoners.

Last year, before Stagwas recorded, Ray and Saliers expressed the same anti-Wenner sentiment in my interview with them for this magazine. But Epic asked that Ray's opinion that Wenner is "sexist and homophobic" be stricken from the interview. Aren't they nervous about this song?

Ray might not admit it, but she enjoys throwing down the political gauntlet, particularly when it comes to the industry. She says she recently played "Lucystoners" for Saliers and their publicist at Epic. "They smiled and laughed a little nervously and said they loved the song. Then they never said anything about it again. I thought to myself, 'The song sucks, they hate it.' But after a while they started joking about it."

Saliers says she had no reservations about the song when she heard it, and no love is lost between her and the magazine. "It's aimed at teenage boys, certainly not me," she says. "Women have it hard. There aren't any alternative women in their magazine. The only women they profile play up their sexuality and conform to traditional gender roles."

And if Wenner is provoked, so much the better. "Any press is good press," Saliers laughs.

Of course, Rolling Stoneand Wenner are just flashy symbols of a music industry both Ray and Saliers are simply fed up with. Ray admits that straddling that line between indie and big-label music is an ongoing inner struggle for her. On the one hand, major labels "have this incredible infrastructure that can't be matched" in the indie world. But she chafes at the homogenization of mainstream music and vacuousness of labels' efforts to market artists.

"Just because you work for [the major labels] doesn't mean you can't criticize them," Ray reasons. "I mean, that's what unions are." She says she'd love to see the big artists at major labels unionize, as session musicians already have, to put some of the soul back into the industry. But she won't hold her breath.

And all that faggot-bashing poetry but the boys are just saying 'love me, please.' -- "Lucystoners"

I'm still on the phone with Ray when over in the living room I catch the flickering of MTV, which is showing for the umpteenth time this week a fictionalized movie about Matthew Shepard's murder. MTV has been on self-imposed probation all week in response to the outcry over its willingness to promote the women-hating, gay-bashing artist Eminem. I ask Ray for her thoughts on the white rapper and the critics who would censor him. She quickly channels her dislike for the man onto the corporate structure that makes such a phenomenon possible.

"I don't think he should be censored, but I think he's a pig," she says. "But it's pointless to argue what MTV thinks it should or shouldn't do. It is just responding to what it perceives to be what the public wants to see. Anything they have ever done that might have been groundbreaking they only did because they thought it was a trend they could make money on."

Ray makes it clear that after the Indigo Girls' next two albums are done and their commitment to Epic is satisfied, they'll be seriously considering going to an indie label themselves, although probably not Daemon, because of Ray's closeness to the label. Ray has mentioned similar women-run, queer-centric labels such as Kill Rock Stars as possibilities, but holds out the possibility that some new label may come along that would be a perfect fit.

In the meantime, she looks to the artists who have advanced the cause of indie music while taking advantage of corporate largesse. "I give Rage Against the Machine heat," she says, because they preached an anticorporate, anticommercial message while promoting themselves on MTV and other commercial outlets. "But we're always hardest on those who are trying to do the most good."

Ray is careful to distinguish message from method. It isn't enough, she says, to talk about revolution; you have to put your mouth where your money is. She points to Fugazi as a role model. That band refused to sign with a major label and puts on all-ages shows where tickets are never more than five bucks a pop. "They really set the standard."