Eli5 why rock n’ roll music in the 90s was called alternative? What was it alternative to? What defined it as a separate genre?
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It was actually called “alternative-rock” and it usually had a lot more grunge sound to it. This was a time when grunge music really came into popularity and took off. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, sound garden and tons more kept making rock n roll music but they didn’t sound anything like 70s rock n roll or 80s hair metal bands. So just calling it “alternative” stuck since it was the alternative to what had already come.
It was an alternative to Van Halen, Gun N Roses, AC-DC, Aerosmith, Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen, Def Leppard, etc. What defined it was sounding different than arena rock.
It was a marketing term for college radio. It was what the young people wanted, to be separate from the previous generation that like Loverboy and Poison.
Not all rock music in the 90s was considered “Alternative” and not all alternative music is from the 90s. Alternative began in the 80s and was the label applied to smaller bands that were considered more mature and thoughtful than the arena rock that dominated the airwaves during that era. The alternative style then grew in popularity over time, eventually breaking the mainstream through the success of bands like Nirvana and REM, at which point what was once the alternative became the mainstream.
Mainstream acts got played on commercial radio. They wouldn’t touch ‘Indie’ or ‘Alternative’ music. Bands like REM (early on), Smiths, Pixies, Cure, Joy Division etc operated in a world outside mainstream. The music was an alternative choice.
It’s worth pointing out that radio was THE way you heard new songs – there was no file sharing, streaming, no spotify etc. Growing up at the time and listening to the bands I’ve mentioned – most people I was with had never ever heard of them because they weren’t ever ever played on commercial radio. You had to actively seek it out. Music was tribal in a way that doesn’t really exist now.
Alternative music was originally a term referring to an alternative to major recording labels. It was a rejection of the popular, and to an extent a rejection of capitalism and commodification of music.
Major labels tended to be looked down on for many reasons. The cultural movement represented by rock n roll was nominally one of rebellion and revolution, liberation and anti-conservstivism.
But the production and selling of music is a business. This creates an inherent conflict and instability.
One naive assumption about this cultural movement is that rock music is in a state of perpetual revolution – – that, rather than rejecting an old order, overthrowing it, in order to build something new and just, it simply exists to perpetually overthrow what came before it, even if what came before is simply a prior generation of rock music.
There was a strong association from rock music’s early days that it was a youth movement, and that musicians as young as their 30s were no longer hip, sexy, and marketable. The industry liked to push new young artists because they are cheaper, have less clout and savvy, and are easier to control, and easier to exploit.
The business of music is often exploitative of the talent that creates it, but doesn’t have the business and marketing savvy to avoid being exploited by managers and producers. The idea a lot of music fans have is that performers are all creators, and that as such they have control over their art. This is only true of very few musical artists, though. Most musical artists are controlled to a greater or lesser degree by their managers and producers. They don’t all write their own original songs, or have full creative control over how their music is arranged, produced, marketed, and so on. And because music makes money when it sells, often commercial concerns were an overriding decider when it came to what music was recorded and how it sounds. This resulted in a “lowest common denominator” approach to creating product that was designed to have mass appeal, and tended to be shallow, dumbed down, and homogenized (“pop”) – – as opposed to truly new, innovative, authentic, deep, complex, or sophisticated.
So alternative music was in a lot of ways an attempt by artists to free themselves from this system. As well, it promised artists a larger piece of a smaller pie, but along with that came greater self determination, control, self expression, authenticity, and integrity.
But as alternative music became successful and popularized, gradually it either fell into the same traps as major label music, or indie label artists would jump to major labels in order to cash in on their position garnered by years of toiling in the relative unknown of the indie scene, but with more experience under their belts so that they would be hopefully less vulnerable to the exploitation endemic with the major labels.
The indie/alternative scene exploded with mainstream popularity in the early 90s, after a period of incubation that had its roots in the 1970s or even earlier. Small labels had always existed, but the music industry is cutthroat and smaller labels often couldn’t stay afloat and would get swallowed by larger companies over time. But there was a spirit of resistance to that happening, which hardened survivors in this business climate and gave them a similar outlook and set of values that influenced the music they produced, and the way it sounded. Not as polished, engineered, or technically correct as what major studios produced, but more unique, more authentic, more individualist, more quirky or weird.
It was an alterative to [This](https://youtu.be/fuKDBPw8wQA) …and [This](https://youtu.be/0u8teXR8VE4) …and yes, especially an alternative to [THIS](https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ)
Then [This happened](https://youtu.be/PbgKEjNBHqM) on my TV one thanksgiving and my uncle pronounced the band name like the host in the video from then on.
All media used to be very top-down, its content being dictated by the decisions of executives at a small handful of record labels and tv stations. Top40 radio dominated the country. Popular culture wasn’t nearly so fragmented as it is now. And being exposed to stuff outside the mainstream wasn’t as convenient or common as it is now.
Music of all varieties that was recorded, distributed, and talked about outside the the major media was called “alternative” going back to the late 70s. Groups and musical movements would periodically bubble up from the alternative space and reach a mainstream audience but this was uncommon. Before grunge bubbled up there were some successful punk and new wave groups that came up from the alternative crowd. And REM.
But alternative acts never took over mainstream music like they did in the 90s.
Prior to the whole Seattle grunge thing, there were other bands that never fit the various “rock” styles. Before the 90’s, most people would argue that Alternative music started around the punk scenes in NYC and London.
Where classic rock basically has bands that all have the same vibe or sound, Alternative bands that emerged from the 70’s and 80’s had a wide array of styles. Depeche Mode were strictly a keyboard band early in their career, while The Cure had a full band that didn’t sound like rock. These bands that had styles and sounds that could not be categorized as Rock would be considered Alternative.
By the time the 90’s hit, Alternative was starting to become the mainstream. Before grunge hit with Nirvana, bands outside of Seattle like Janes Addiction and The Red Hot Chilli Peppers were starting to pave a path for a different store of music than classic rock and hair metal.
Once Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, and Sound Garden hit, it all became Alternative Rock.
Plenty of US-based answers. I first heard the Cure, the Smiths and Joy Division on John Peel’s evening radio show on BBC Radio 1. They all subsequently appeared on the very commercial “Top of the Pops” at 7:30 in the evening.
I think the main difference from non-alt groups was that they were not ***aiming*** to fit in with the commercial pop bands. Their success was not due to trying for a conventionally successful sound.
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