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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The style of 90’s rock actually began in the 80’s but was not very popular in the culture at large during that decade, which is why it was called alternative. In the 90’s that style finally went mainstream with artists like Nirvana topping the charts, and the term of ‘alternative’ stuck even though it had become somewhat of a misnomer by that point.
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.
It was college rock in the 80’s. I remember REM’s Document being hot. That was in 87 or 88. I can still quote Violent Femmes. When grunge (Pearl Jam) and college rock (REM) mixed, we have what you now call alternative.
Like others have said, it just wasn’t mainstream. You could find Micheal Jackson or Bon Jovi on the Tv and radio everywhere. You had to go out of your way to hear Tori Amos or Smashing Pumpkins.
There were stations and record stores devoted to this stuff. I remember going to release parties, where the “record store” would open at midnight for a new album. It was a whole sub-genre of ppl that were participating.
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