Product Code Database
Alternative rock (also known as alternative music, alt-rock or simply alternative) is a category of rock music that evolved from the independent music underground of the 1970s. Alternative rock acts achieved mainstream success in the 1990s with the likes of the grunge subgenre in the United States, and the Britpop and shoegaze subgenres in the United Kingdom and Ireland. During this period, many record labels were looking for "alternatives", as many Arena rock, hard rock, and glam metal acts from the 1980s were beginning to grow stale throughout the music industry. The emergence of Generation X as a Culture force in the 1990s also contributed greatly to the rise of alternative music.
"Alternative" refers to the genre's distinction from mainstream or arena rock or pop. The term's original meaning was broader, referring to musicians influenced by the musical style or independent, DIY ethic ethos of late-1970s punk rock.di Perna, Alan. "Brave Noise—The History of Alternative Rock Guitar". Guitar World. December 1995. Traditionally, alternative rock varied in terms of its sound, social context, and regional roots. Throughout the 1980s, magazines and , college radio airplay, and word of mouth had increased the prominence and highlighted the diversity of alternative rock's distinct styles (and music scenes), such as noise pop, indie rock, grunge, and shoegaze. In September 1988, Billboard introduced "alternative" into their charting system to reflect the rise of the format across radio stations in the United States by stations like KROQ-FM in Los Angeles and WFME-FM in New York, which were playing music from more underground, independent, and non-commercial rock artists.
Initially, several alternative styles achieved minor mainstream notice and a few bands, such as R.E.M. and Jane's Addiction, were signed to major labels. Most alternative bands at the time, like the Smiths, one of the key British alternative rock bands during the 1980s, remained signed to independent labels and received relatively little attention from mainstream radio, television, or newspapers. With the breakthrough of Nirvana and the popularity of the grunge and Britpop movements in the 1990s, alternative rock entered the musical mainstream, and many alternative bands became successful.
Emo found mainstream success in the 2000s with multi-platinum acts such as Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Paramore and Panic! at the Disco. Bands such as the White Stripes and the Strokes found commercial success in the early 2000s, influencing an influx of new alternative rock bands that drew inspiration from garage rock, post-punk and new wave, establishing a revival of the genres.
Before the term alternative rock came into common usage around 1990, the sorts of music to which it refers were known by a variety of terms. In 1979, Terry Tolkin used the term Alternative Music to describe the groups he was writing about. In 1979 Dallas radio station KBFB had a late night new wave show entitled "Rock and Roll Alternative". "College rock" was used in the United States to describe the music during the 1980s due to its links to the Campus radio circuit and the tastes of college students. In the United Kingdom, dozens of small DIY ethic record labels emerged as a result of the punk subculture. According to the founder of one of these labels, Cherry Red, NME and Sounds magazines published charts based on small record stores called "Alternative Charts". The first national chart based on distribution called the Indie Chart was published in January 1980; it immediately succeeded in its aim to help these labels. At the time, the term indie was used literally to describe independently distributed records. By 1985, indie had come to mean a particular genre, or group of subgenres, rather than simply distribution status.
The use of the term alternative to describe rock music originated around the mid-1980s;Thompson, Dave. "Introduction". Third Ear: Alternative Rock. San Francisco: Miller Freeman, 2000. p. viii. at the time, the common music industry terms for cutting-edge music were new music and Postmodern music, respectively indicating freshness and a tendency to recontextualize sounds of the past. A similar term, alternative pop, emerged around 1985.
In 1987, Spin magazine categorized college rock band Camper Van Beethoven as "alternative/indie", saying that their 1985 song "Where the Hell Is Bill" (from Telephone Free Landslide Victory) "called out the alternative/independent scene and dryly tore it apart." David Lowery, then frontman of Camper Van Beethoven, later recalled: "I remember first seeing that word applied to us... The nearest I could figure is that we seemed like a punk band, but we were playing pop music, so they made up this word alternative for those of us who do that." DJs and promoters during the 1980s claim the term originates from American FM radio of the 1970s, which served as a progressive alternative to top 40 by featuring longer songs and giving DJs more freedom in song selection. According to one former DJ and promoter, "Somehow this term 'alternative' got rediscovered and heisted by Campus radio people during the 80s who applied it to new post-punk, indie, or underground-whatever music."Mullen, Brendan. Whores: An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane's Addiction. Cambridge: Da Capo, 2005. p. 19. .
At first the term referred to intentionally non-mainstream rock acts that were not influenced by "heavy metal ballads, rarefied new wave" and "high-energy dance anthems". Usage of the term would broaden to include new wave, pop, punk rock, post-punk, and occasionally "college rock"/"Indie rock" rock, all found on the American "commercial alternative" radio stations of the time such as Los Angeles' KROQ-FM. Journalist Jim Gerr wrote that Alternative also encompassed variants such as "rap, trash, metal and industrial". The bill of the first Lollapalooza, an itinerant festival in North America conceived by Jane's Addiction frontman Perry Farrell, reunited "disparate elements of the alternative rock community" including Henry Rollins, Butthole Surfers, Ice-T, Nine Inch Nails, Siouxsie and the Banshees (as second headliners) and Jane's Addiction (as the headlining act). Covering for MTV the opening date of Lollapalooza in Phoenix in July 1991, Dave Kendall introduced the report saying the festival presented the "most diverse lineups of alternative rock".Kendall, Dave. "MTV Week in Rock – Lollapalooza" . youtube. July 1991. November 2, 2019. That summer, Farrell had coined the term Alternative Nation.
In December 1991, Spin magazine noted: "this year, for the first time, it became resoundingly clear that what has formerly been considered alternative rock—a college-centered marketing group with fairly lucrative, if limited, potential—has in fact moved into the mainstream."
In the late 1990s, the definition again became more specific. In 1997, Neil Strauss of The New York Times defined alternative rock as "hard-edged rock distinguished by brittle, '70s-inspired guitar riffing and singers agonizing over their problems until they take on epic proportions."
Defining music as alternative is often difficult because of two conflicting applications of the word. Alternative can describe music that challenges the status quo and that is "fiercely iconoclastic, anticommercial, and antimainstream", and the term is also used in the music industry to denote "the choices available to consumers via record stores, radio, cable television, and the Internet."Starr, Larry; Waterman, Christopher. . New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. p. 430. . However alternative music has paradoxically become just as commercial and marketable as the mainstream rock, with record companies using the term "alternative" to market music to an audience that mainstream rock does not reach. Using a broad definition of the genre, Dave Thompson in his book Alternative Rock cites the formation of the Sex Pistols as well as the release of the albums Horses by Patti Smith and Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed as three key events that gave birth to alternative rock. Additionally, Rhys Wiliams of Loudersound observed, "musical genres collided more in the 90s than in any other decade, making 'alternative' rock ever harder to define." Until the early 2000s, when indie rock became the most common term in the US to describe modern pop and rock, the terms "indie rock" and "alternative rock" were often used interchangeably; while there are aspects which both genres have in common, "indie rock" was regarded as a British-based term, unlike the more American "alternative rock".
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> "American Alternative Rock/Post-Punk". AllMusic. Retrieved May 20, 2006. Throughout much of its history, alternative rock has been largely defined by its rejection of the commercialism of mainstream culture, although this could be contested since some of the major alternative artists have eventually achieved mainstream success or co-opted with the major labels from the 1990s onward (especially into the 2000s, and beyond). In the 1980s, alternative bands generally played in small clubs, recorded for indie labels, and spread their popularity through word of mouth."Rock Music". Microsoft Encarta 2006 CD. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2005. As such, there is no set musical style for alternative rock as a whole, although in 1989 The New York Times asserted that the genre is "guitar music first of all, with guitars that blast out power chords, pick out chiming riffs, buzz with fuzztone and squeal in feedback." More often than in other rock styles since the mainstreaming of rock music, alternative rock lyrics tend to address topics of social concern, such as drug use, depression, suicide, and environmentalism. This approach to lyrics developed as a reflection of the social and economic strains in the United States and United Kingdom of the 1980s and early 1990s.
Although American alternative artists of the 1980s never generated spectacular album sales, they exerted a considerable influence on later alternative musicians and laid the groundwork for their success. On September 10, 1988, an Alternative Songs chart was created by Billboard, listing the 40 most-played songs on alternative and modern rock radio stations in the US: the first number one was "Peek-a-Boo" by Siouxsie and the Banshees. By 1989, the genre had become popular enough that a package tour featuring New Order, Public Image Limited and the Sugarcubes toured the US arena circuit."Review/Rock; Arena-Size Bill of Alternative Rock". The New York Times. July 21, 1989. "It was the final show on a package tour that brought what used to be post-punk alternative rock, the province of clubs and cult audiences, to the arena circuit across the United States."
Early on, British alternative rock was distinguished from that of the US by a more pop-oriented focus (marked by an equal emphasis on albums and singles, as well as greater openness to incorporating elements of dance and club culture) and a lyrical emphasis on specifically British concerns. As a result, few British alternative bands have achieved commercial success in the US. Since the 1980s, alternative rock has been played extensively on the radio in the UK, particularly by disc jockeys such as John Peel (who championed alternative music on BBC Radio 1), Richard Skinner, and Annie Nightingale. Artists with cult followings in the US received greater exposure through British national radio and the weekly music press, and many alternative bands had chart success there.Charlton, p. 349 such as the Smiths and the Cure.
American indie record labels SST Records, Twin/Tone Records, Touch and Go Records, and Dischord Records presided over the shift from the hardcore punk that then dominated the American underground scene to the more diverse styles of alternative rock that were emerging. Minneapolis bands Hüsker Dü and the Replacements were indicative of this shift. Both started out as punk rock bands, but soon diversified their sounds and became more melodic. Michael Azerrad asserted that Hüsker Dü was the key link between hardcore punk and the more melodic, diverse music of college rock that emerged. Azerrad wrote, "Hüsker Dü played a huge role in convincing the underground that melody and punk rock weren't antithetical." The band also set an example by being the first group from the American indie scene to sign to a major record label, which helped establish college rock as "a viable commercial enterprise". By focusing on heartfelt songwriting and wordplay instead of political concerns, the Replacements upended a number of underground scene conventions; Azerrad noted that "along with R.E.M., they were one of the few underground bands that mainstream people liked."
By the late 1980s, the American alternative scene was dominated by styles ranging from quirky alternative pop (They Might Be Giants and Camper Van Beethoven), to noise rock (Sonic Youth, Big Black, the Jesus LizardErlewine, Stephen Thomas. . AllMusic. Retrieved August 25, 2008.) and industrial rock (Ministry, Nine Inch Nails). These sounds were in turn followed by the advent of Boston's Pixies and Los Angeles' Jane's Addiction. Around the same time, the grunge subgenre emerged in Seattle, Washington, initially referred to as "The Seattle Sound" until its rise to popularity in the early 1990s. Grunge featured a sludgy, murky guitar sound that syncretized heavy metal and punk rock. Promoted largely by Seattle indie label Sub Pop, grunge bands were noted for their Charity shop fashion which favored flannel shirts and combat boots suited to the local weather.Marin, Rick. "Grunge: A Success Story". The New York Times. November 15, 1992. Early grunge bands Soundgarden and Mudhoney found critical acclaim in the U.S. and UK, respectively.
By the end of the decade, a number of alternative bands began to sign to major labels. While early major label signings Hüsker Dü and the Replacements had little success, acts who signed with majors in their wake such as R.E.M. and Jane's Addiction achieved gold and platinum records, setting the stage for alternative's later breakthrough. Some bands such as Pixies had massive success overseas while they were ignored domestically.
In the middle of the decade, Hüsker Dü's album Zen Arcade influenced other hardcore acts by tackling personal issues. Out of Washington, D.C.'s hardcore scene what was called "emocore" or, later, "emo" emerged and was noted for its lyrics which delved into emotional, very personal subject matter (vocalists sometimes cried) and added free association poetry and a confessional tone. Rites of Spring has been described as the first "emo" band. Former Minor Threat singer Ian MacKaye founded Dischord Records which became the center for the city's emo scene.
The key British alternative rock band to emerge during the 1980s was Manchester's the Smiths. Music journalist Simon Reynolds singled out the Smiths and their American contemporaries R.E.M. as "the two most important alt-rock bands of the day", commenting that they "were eighties bands only in the sense of being against the eighties". The Smiths exerted an influence over the British indie scene through the end of the decade, as various bands drew from singer Morrissey's English-centered lyrical topics and guitarist Johnny Marr's jangly guitar-playing style. The C86 cassette, a 1986 NME premium featuring Primal Scream, the Wedding Present and others, was a major influence on the development of indie pop and the British indie scene as a whole.
Other forms of alternative rock developed in the UK during the 1980s. the Jesus and Mary Chain's sound combined the Velvet Underground's "melancholy noise" with Beach Boys pop melodies and Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" production, while New Order emerged from the demise of post-punk band Joy Division and experimented with disco and dance music. The Mary Chain, along with Dinosaur Jr., C86 and the dream pop of Cocteau Twins, were the formative influences for the shoegazing movement of the late 1980s. Named for the band members' tendency to stare at their feet and guitar onstage rather than interact with the audience, shoegazing acts like My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive created an overwhelmingly loud "wash of sound" that obscured vocals and melodies with long, droning riffs, distortion, and feedback. Shoegazing bands dominated the British music press at the end of the decade along with the Madchester scene. Performing for the most part in the Haçienda, a nightclub in Manchester owned by New Order and Factory Records, Madchester bands such as Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses mixed acid house dance rhythms with melodic guitar pop.
The first edition of the Lollapalooza festival became the most successful tour in North America in July and August 1991. For Dave Grohl of Nirvana who attended the festival at an open-air amphitheater in Southern California, "it felt like something was happening, that was the beginning of it all". The tour helped change the mentalities in the music industry: "by that fall, radio and MTV and music had changed. I really think that if it weren't for Perry Farrell, if it weren't for Lollapalooza, you and I wouldn't be having this conversation right now".
The release of Nirvana's single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in September 1991 "marked the instigation of the grunge music phenomenon". Helped by constant airplay of the song's music video on MTV, their album Nevermind was selling 400,000 copies a week by Christmas 1991. Its success surprised the music industry. Nevermind not only popularized grunge, but also established "the cultural and commercial viability of alternative rock in general." Michael Azerrad asserted that Nevermind symbolized "a sea-change in rock music" in which the glam metal that had dominated rock music at that time fell out of favor in the face of music that was authentic and culturally relevant. The breakthrough success of Nirvana led to the widespread popularization of alternative rock in the 1990s. It heralded a "new openness to alternative rock" among commercial radio stations, opening doors for heavier alternative bands in particular.Rosen, Craig. "Some See 'New Openness' Following Nirvana Success". Billboard. January 25, 1992. In the wake of Nevermind, alternative rock "found itself dragged-kicking and screaming ... into the mainstream" and record companies, confused by the genre's success yet eager to capitalize on it, scrambled to sign bands. The New York Times declared in 1993, "Alternative rock doesn't seem so alternative anymore. Every major label has a handful of guitar-driven bands in shapeless shirts and threadbare jeans, bands with bad posture and good riffs who cultivate the oblique and the evasive, who conceal catchy tunes with noise and hide craftsmanship behind nonchalance." However, many alternative rock artists rejected success, for it conflicted with the rebellious, DIY ethic the genre had espoused before mainstream exposure and their ideas of artistic authenticity.Considine, J.D. "The Decade of Living Dangerously". Guitar World. March 1999 Craig Schuftan of ABC Online assessed, "On the one hand, alternative gave rise to a resilient and resourceful underground, and on the other, to a hunger for pop justice, for a future world where good music could be popular, and popular music could be good. Thus, when underground music finally broke through to the mainstream in 1991, the event was either denounced as a gigantic sellout or celebrated as a revolution, sometimes both at the same time. It was an intellectual balancing act that could only pulled off with the help of that staple of '90s pop life—postmodern irony."
Nirvana's follow-up album In Utero (1993) was an intentionally abrasive album that Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic described as a "wild aggressive sound, a true alternative record."DeRogatis, Jim. Milk It!: Collected Musings on the Alternative Music Explosion of the 90's. Cambridge: Da Capo, 2003. p. 18. . Nevertheless, upon its release in September 1993 In Utero topped the Billboard charts. Pearl Jam also continued to perform well commercially with its second album, Vs. (1993), which topped the Billboard charts by selling a record 950,378 copies in its first week of release. In 1993, the Smashing Pumpkins released their major breakthrough album, Siamese Dream—which debuted at number 10 on the Billboard 200 and sold over 4 million copies by 1996, receiving multi-platinum certification by the RIAA. The strong influence of heavy metal and progressive rock on the album helped to legitimize alternative rock to mainstream radio programmers and close the gap between alternative rock and the type of rock played on American 1970s Album Oriented Rock radio. In 1995, the band released their double album, Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness—which went on to sell 10 million copies in the US alone, certifying it as a Diamond record.
Britpop bands were influenced by and displayed reverence for British guitar music of the past, particularly movements and genres such as the British Invasion, glam rock, and punk rock. In 1995, the Britpop phenomenon culminated in a rivalry between its two chief groups, Oasis and Blur, symbolized by their release of competing singles "Roll With It" and "Country House" on the same day on 14 August 1995. Blur won "The Battle of Britpop", but they were soon eclipsed in popularity by Oasis, whose second album, (What's the Story) Morning Glory? (1995), went on to become the third best-selling album in the UK's history.
Labels such as Matador Records, Merge Records, and Dischord Records, and indie rockers like Pavement, Superchunk, Fugazi, and Sleater-Kinney dominated the American indie scene for most of the 1990s. One of the main indie rock movements of the 1990s was slacker rock. The movement, which focused on the recording and distribution of music on low-quality cassette tapes, initially emerged in the 1980s. By 1992, Pavement, Guided by Voices and Sebadoh became popular lo-fi cult acts in the United States, while subsequently artists like Beck and Liz Phair brought the aesthetic to mainstream audiences. The period also saw alternative confessional female singer-songwriters. Besides the aforementioned Liz Phair, PJ Harvey fit into this sub group.Erlewine, Stephen Thomas. . Billboard.com. Retrieved July 20, 2012.
In the mid-1990s, Sunny Day Real Estate defined the emo genre. Weezer's album Pinkerton (1996) was also influential.
A related genre, math rock, peaked in the mid-1990s. In comparison to post-rock, math rock relies on more complex time signatures and intertwining phrases. By the end of the decade a backlash had emerged against post-rock due to its "dispassionate intellectuality" and its perceived increasing predictability, but a new wave of post-rock bands such as Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Sigur Rós emerged who further expanded the genre.
A signifier of alternative rock's changes was the hiatus of the Lollapalooza festival after an unsuccessful attempt to find a headliner in 1998. In light of the festival's troubles that year, Spin said, "Lollapalooza is as comatose as alternative rock right now".Weisbard, Eric. "This Monkey's Gone to Heaven". Spin. July 1998. Despite these changes in style however, alternative rock remained commercially viable into the start of the 21st century.
Originally, post-grunge was a label used almost pejoratively on bands that emerged when grunge was mainstream and emulated the grunge sound. The label suggested that bands labelled as post-grunge were simply musically derivative, or a cynical response to an "authentic" rock movement. Bush, Candlebox and Collective Soul were labelled almost pejoratively as post-grunge which, according to Tim Grierson of About.com, is "suggesting that rather than being a musical movement in their own right, they were just a calculated, cynical response to a legitimate stylistic shift in rock music." Post-grunge morphed during the late 1990s and 2000s as newer bands such as Foo Fighters, Matchbox Twenty, Creed and Nickelback emerged, becoming among the most popular rock bands in the United States.
American alternative duo Twenty One Pilots blurs between the lines of multiple genres including hip-hop, emo, rock, indie pop and reggae and has managed to break numerous records. They became the first alternative act to have two concurrent top five singles in the United States while their fourth studio album Blurryface (2015) was the first album in history to have every song receive at least a Gold certification from the Recording Industry Association of America. Twenty One Pilots also became the first rock act to have a song reach a billion streams on Spotify. Their breakout hit single "Stressed Out" was the twenty-fifth song to achieve the rare feat of at least one billion plays on the Streaming media platform. The milestone comes at a time when music genres represented on streaming platforms like Spotify are fairly homogeneous, being dominated by genres such as hip hop, EDM, and adult contemporary-styled pop.
In the early 2010s, American singer Lana Del Rey developed a "cult-like following" with her "cinematic, beat-heavy alt-pop", which was characterized by an "alluring sadness and melodrama". New Zealand alt-pop singer Lorde achieved global success in 2013 and 2014, topping charts and winning awards. In 2022, American singer Billie Eilish was credited with marking the "ascendence" of alternative pop in the mainstream with her dark, downbeat pop.
The Weeknd being a prime example of the genre has gained mainstream success with his second studio album Beauty Behind the Madness and his third studio album Starboy and has been considered a staple of alt-R&B.
Radio formats
|
|
