Androgynous imagery and stylings are hardly unknown in American pop music, of course--Little Richard is proof of that, and this list has already featured David Bowie, who pioneered his own style of glam androgyny in the UK (and, to a limited extent, the United States) during the 1970s, a style which became a background influence to many Second British Invasion bands I'm highlighting here. But here's the thing: overwhelming--and not just throughout the history of pop music, but up through these very cosmopolitan, very gender-bending bands that I'm highlighting here--it was the men who could be androgynous, not the women. Sure, a woman wearing pants on the screen was as familiar to American audiences as Katherine Hepburn or Mary Tyler Moore. But a woman with Annie Lennox's near-incomparable pop vocals, staring into the camera with a sensual, hypnotic, both enticing and spooky synthesizer beat in the background, slowing slamming her cane into her open hand while singing "Some of them want to use you / Some of them want to get used by you / Some of them want to abuse you / Some of them want to be abused"? That, ladies and gentlemen, was a game-changer.