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’s kind of erroneous to talk about the 90s, because by the time “alternative” became a household term in the early 90s, alternative rock had already gone mainstream.
What you need to look at is the mid to late 1980s. There was plenty of rock on the radio, but it was either of the hair variety or super commercial.
Meanwhile college radio was radically different, championing a variety of acts that weren’t getting even a sniff of mainstream airplay. That scene then grew and grew and grew until by the tail end of the 1980s, the labels realized you could make quite abit of money on this stuff selling records even without mainstream radio airplay, because so many young people were listening to college radio exclusively. And because the record labels love tracking stuff and ranking it, the “alternative charts” came about. That then grew into the Lollapalooza travelling festival etc.
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