The "Alternative" Thread

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Jason Manley, Dec 3, 2019.

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  1. Nice Marmot

    Nice Marmot Nothin’ feels right but doin’ wrong anymore

    Location:
    Tryon NC
    Cobain had an impeccable sense of melody. CCR had it. Billy Joel had it. The music sounds complex yet simple at the same time. It’s a shame people couldn’t just appreciate this. Instead, they insisted he was more than he wanted to be.
     
  2. Jason Manley

    Jason Manley Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    O-H-I-O
  3. WLL

    WLL Popery Of Mopery

    ...Haaaah. Interesting:sigh:.
     
  4. Jason Manley

    Jason Manley Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    O-H-I-O
    What is? The thread or a Cobain album of blues covers?
     
  5. Jason Manley

    Jason Manley Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    O-H-I-O
    Anyone ever read this book?

    Spin Alternative Record Guide

    [​IMG]
     
  6. WilliamWes

    WilliamWes Likes to sing along but he knows not what it means

    Location:
    New York
    I have a few comments:
    I think you do a pretty good job of trying to wrap up the alternative era in one post but maybe you didn't want to go on too long. Maybe you can expand upon:

    1. With all this said, there was a whole UK alternative scene. What do you think of it and how does it relate to the US scene?

    2. It's difficult to agree with the AV Club writer when he mentions 'Cumbersome' as another downhill moment yet has not realized all the pics he posted were of artists that had critically and commercially successful albums along with re-evaluated post-grunge albums. 1996 was a kind of final year for grunge alone but not for alt overall. How do you feel about the late 90's?

    3. What do you feel about alternative being successful in the early 90's? You kind of pass right over the part where alternative was thriving. You went from MJack/Nirvana to the genre receding.

    4. How can the AV Club claim it died a forgettable death when: a) he's writing about it 20 years later and b) alternative was a hot commodity through the early to mid 2000's when it continued to have big success on the charts. So far, the thread has been more about the 'feeling' of everything but there's chart action and sales that isn't being mentioned in that article. So, do you think a genre dies even if the music is successful for years after?

    5. Yes, some were turned off by a saturation of alt into the mainstream but then look at what 'alt' represented. The kind of young person that didn't fit in and felt uncomfortable because of it. Yet that perspective was so universal that it touched a generation very strongly. It made them realize it was ok to be different and hence the organic way Nirvana changed the culture. But if you now see others felt uncomfortable too, what's the harm in knowing others share your perspective?

    This makes me wonder whether someone wants to continue being different just for the sake of feeling unique - or do you accept you weren't really and many felt ostracized and went to alt for something different. Did alt fans not want alt to be as popular as it was like Cobain kind of thought? Popular enough to watch on MTV but not popular enough for people watching another channel? What was the original goal - stay underground for only the 'cool' kids to get? Once everyone got it, it wasn't cool? Or was it a success because it took over?

    6. For alienated fans of their own original alienation, they turned to whatever was underground in the late 90's - 'Keep It Like A Secret' - Built To Spill, Gomez, The Sea And Cake - most was considered indie rock - what do you think of indie rock?
     
  7. Technocentral

    Technocentral Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dublin, Ireland
    Compared to pop stars like Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift she definitely is.
     
  8. Technocentral

    Technocentral Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dublin, Ireland
    I would use the term "Indie" to describe the sort of music we are talking about, of course originally it was a literal thing meaning non mainstream music put out on independent labels but its also a genre, The Cocteau Twins were Indie and were on 4AD but also IMO bands like The Smiths, The The and The Cure even though They were on a major.
     
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  9. katieinthecoconut

    katieinthecoconut Forum Resident

    Location:
    United Kingdom
    She is a pop star. P!nk was a pop star too, so was Avril Lavigne. But I guess if people want to buy into a marketing ploy, then sure.
     
  10. But in these days of TikTok she appears intimate and reachable coming right out of her home after working on songs with her brother. Her manufacture is purposely hazy, for those who Weyes Blood may be too edgy. Yet possibly the same results for differently nuanced audiences.

    I guess we've come full circle when genre definitions of alternative and indie are being worried about being 'watered down".
     
    Last edited: Dec 4, 2019
  11. WilliamWes

    WilliamWes Likes to sing along but he knows not what it means

    Location:
    New York
    I think alternative did enough to blur the genre lines between it and mainstream rock, pop or alt. pop. It's a matter of how far into left field the music is and sometimes the image - image, labelling and marketing have always been a part of the biz. Should I be a fan of hers by being dependent on a record label or genre label? Plenty of people can see beyond that. Does it matter if she's pop or alt? There can be greatness on a minor or major label and greatness within pop and within alt.
     
  12. katieinthecoconut

    katieinthecoconut Forum Resident

    Location:
    United Kingdom
    I'm not saying pop is a bad thing, I like lots of pop music, and don't mind one of Billie Eilish's songs either. It's also worth bearing in mind I'm just about in the target demographic for her music (maybe the top end of it by now, but still). I still just feel it's inappropriate to refer to a pop artist, manufactured in popularity since day one by the industry juggernaut, as alternative music, regardless of whether a radio station might playlist her as such here and there, or whether she might be portrayed as a bit "edgy" in her look. I feel the same way when people claim someone like Sufjan Stevens is pop music.

    I fear I may have derailed the thread a little bit, though: My original point, which got onto this, was that alternative music is still alive and well, and Billie Eilish is not the best example, or even an example, of it.
     
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  13. NettleBed

    NettleBed Forum Transient

    Location:
    new york city
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  14. WilliamWes

    WilliamWes Likes to sing along but he knows not what it means

    Location:
    New York
    Actually to tie your post to the thread, what about the women during this 80's and 90's era? Where do they fit into the narrative? You can answer, or the OP, or anyone.
     
  15. Rafael Blues

    Rafael Blues Forum Resident

    Location:
    Brazil
    I have an ambiguous point of view about Kurt Cobain. I really admire his talent and how he got rock back to the top again but at some points I'm critical. I believe the artist should be grateful to his audience and do their best on stage. The shows that Nirvana did in Brazil were a total disaster, Kurt Cobain was worse than ever. Many of the people who went to these shows were poor people, hard working people, people who spent 1/3 of their salary to buy the ticket. They expected to hear good music but all they had was a totally drugged Cobain crawling on stage.
     
  16. Jason Manley

    Jason Manley Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    O-H-I-O
    Interesting you should ask. I just went back and listened to Rhino's "The Brit Box: U.K. Indie, Shoegaze, and Brit-Pop Gems of the Last Millennium" recently. In a way, I think what happened in both the US and UK kind of mirrored each other. There was a punk scene, then a new wave scene and post-new wave you have what is contained in the aforementioned box set. Shoegaze was like the British Grunge.

    The era covered in that box set (1985-1999, particularly the first ten years) is equally vital to this discussion. When the British scene became a Blur vs. Oasis "thing" it was much less interesting, to me.


    I have mixed feelings about them, especially given the distance between now and then. I was in my early 20's during that time (1996-1999). I worked in a record store from '95 to '98 so I got to hear a lot of stuff. At the time it felt like there was a lot of derivative music being pushed by the majors and mid-majors. Some obvious distinctions would be made for Radiohead, Spiritualized, etc. They were making experimental "alternative" rock. I could almost start to make historical parallels with '95'-'99 as being like the prog rock years in the 70's that proceeded punk rock. As soon as the calendar rolled over you had some push back for something more distilled like The Strokes, The White Stripes, etc. It's very cyclical.

    That said, and this is just my opinion, I find myself much less interested in anything that happened after 1995 as the years go by. That probably has to do with age, which I will readily admit. But I will also say this, it's interesting that "120 Minutes" was cancelled from MTV in April 2000. From there it was relegated to MTV2 where it only ran for a couple more years after in its original format. There were revivals, "Subterranean" being the main one. It's interesting that around '99 and 2000 is when Napster became popular and Music Television started to shake up their lineup. That's something that I would like to flesh out at some point.

    You're right, I didn't spend a lot of time fleshing that out. Partly because I figured that the bulk of the discussion would center around that period. That window of roughly '91 to '94 is where this 'thing', "Alternative Music" competed with the mainstream as a sort of alternate universe. And that might be the core of this whole discussion. The "Alternative" scene was an alternate universe to the mainstream with it's own unwritten rules and transnational successes.

    During this period, MTV's Buzz Bin, which had started in '89, if I'm not mistaken, became very prominent on that network. Alt-stations began popping up around the country in the US the meet the demand of a format for this 'thing'. In the city I live in now, the station WWCD started in 1990 as 101.1 (now 102.5). The format has remained unchanged since its' inception. Billboard started their Modern Rock chart in September '88, just as I was going into middle school. The city I grew up in (Memphis) didn't get an alt-station until '93 so we were really late to the game. We had 96X (can't remember the call sign). So, truly, for me it was all about Sunday night and "120 Minutes" and whatever was in the Buzz Bin.

    By the time '93-'94 rolled around the Alternative "scene" was probably at its zenith. 1994 was probably the high watermark for all of this, in my opinion. As Rolling Stone (of all places) wrote several years ago, 1994 was the year the world "alternative" lost all meaning. That year alone, you had Frank Black's masterpiece "Teenager of the Year", Pavement's sophomore album "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain" and Nirvana "MTV Unplugged". What an awesome year! That's just scratching the surface of the memorable records from that year. It's also the same year where a lot of records that straddled the fence between alt and mainstream hit.

    The Alternative music scene at that point was practically the mainstream... for one hot minute. In 1995 the scene was still being pushed by MTV, Spin Magazine was thriving, Alt Press, CMJ, etc.

    So, what happened after '95 and '96? And why I think The A.V. Club article is kind of spot on is that the major labels had seemingly rung the scene dry looking for the next big thing. Once it was clear there wouldn't be one, they went back to what they knew worked. It's not an accident that 1996 is the year the Spice Girls first appeared, followed in quick succession the boy bands, etc. The Alternative "scene" that had threatened to become the mainstream (the alternate universe was now the world we lived in) started to recede overnight.

    I think his point is that the music that was on the Modern Rock charts in 1996 was very forgettable and inconsequential. It depends on what you consider alternative, I guess. I mean, yes there was success being had in the late 90's in early 2000's. But a lot of what was being pushed at the time by the majors (Limp Bizkit, Creed, etc) bore little resemblance to what came before. They were, at best an out of focus facsimile and at worst... well, I want to keep this polite.

    Yes, I absolutely think it's possible that a genre dies even if there continues to be chart success. There were a number of great artists in the late 90s (Elliott Smith, Built to Spill, Belle and Sebastian, to name a few). But they sold a fraction of what similar artists had just several years before.

    I don't follow?

    This is harder to answer, I guess. For me, it was always about authenticity. A band like The Replacements could've made the same music they made and done it in leather pants with misogynistic videos and sold millions, probably. They didn't. That's authenticity.

    Sonic Youth signed with Geffen in 1990 but they were able to maintain their underground following while bring along people like me who were too young or didn't have access to the underground. They did that by staying true to themselves and having something to say. Whether or not I always agreed with it, didn't matter. I respected it.

    In my middle school years and high school years which roughly covered the years 1988 to 1994, the most popular recording artists were Whitney Houston, Garth Brooks and Guns N' Roses. That was fine for most kids. Some of us wanted something deeper than that though, not deeper in meaning but deeper in substance.

    I love indie rock. It's basically the spirit of the "alternative" days carried forward for modern audiences. There's a ton of indie artists out there now that are "left of the dial". What's strange though is to flip on an alt-station and hear Imagine Dragons or AWOLNATION (just using them as an example, there's about 20 others I could list). It just seems so out of place.

    When Nirvana and Sonic Youth signed with Geffen they were on the DGC imprint. That allowed for whatever creative freedom they were allowed (another topic) and also it gave them indie-cred cover. That's all gone now. I'm not lamenting it — it was life changing when it was happening.
     
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  17. WilliamWes

    WilliamWes Likes to sing along but he knows not what it means

    Location:
    New York
    So a couple of things:
    Back in the late 90's I went to a Ken Burns speech about his doc 'Jazz'. I went because I was going to ask him why he stopped in 1970 when there was another 25 years of jazz not covered. Instead, someone else asked and he played it off like past 1970 wasn't really as significant because it was a lesser genre by then compared to what was popular. Then why didn't he name it 'Jazz: When It Was Popular' or 'Jazz - 1800's to 1970'?

    I think the whole picture needs to be viewed on two levels with alt music. 1. Both aesthetics/critical opinion and popularity/charts/sales need to be viewed. When only aesthetics becomes the conversation, it's less based in fact than actual numbers. Both critical and commercial sides are vital to the conversation.

    The whole picture also goes past 1996. I can claim any year was the year I stopped listening or stopped liking something but the world goes on and when I see Woodstock 1999 - I see a lot of artists that people didn't like - but they were the draws of the time. They had the youth's ears and maybe it was a new generation but that's what alt changed to whether we liked it or not. There was always successful pop, rap, etc - MTV went over to pop and rap but the charts took years to reflect alt's lack of success. Half the mainstream rock list was modern rock artists - whether we consider them or not - they were marketed that way.

    As for post grunge - there a lot of albums that are still revered today - The AV Club article is totally one-sided about how authentic and 'good' something was, but it's all opinion and little in facts. They don't acknowledge these albums were re-evaluated. It's like if I said STP was a Pearl Jam ripoff with 'Core' and then they fizzled out and died without mentioning that they grew, moved on, got critically acclaimed and eventually was no longer considered a PJ ripoff.

    So the whole story -both critical and commercial sides I think could be and probably should be discussed. Yes R.E.M. in the 80s in hindsight in alternative/indie because eventually it was put into a category. But Rage Against The Machine was also alternative - anyone else really sound like them when they had their debut? They stayed with the same sound and in 1999, they were still alternative.
    ----
    I guess my point is the whole story is important - I don't think a genre dies until both critically and commercially it dies, and what did alt fans want? To stay underground forever with alt having the exact same sound forever or to accept that alt was a big success as it gradually changed from a mix of grunge, Brit-pop, shoegaze, etc. to rap rock, alt metal, nu-metal and post-grunge? Scenes change, bands change, music changes - at all times. Sometimes a genre changes as well.
     
  18. Jason Manley

    Jason Manley Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
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    I think the difference here between something like Jazz and Alternative is that one is a genre and the other is a movement.

    As much as I don't consider most post-millennium Alternative music to truly be "Alternative" in aesthetic and substance; that's just my heavily weighted opinion. Naturally, the reality is that there are AAA (Adult Album Alternative) stations around the US (and probably abroad). I would just simply say that what passes for "Alternative" now and really going back about 20 years doesn't do it for me. And again I'll say...maybe it's not meant for me. ;)
     
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