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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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.
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