The exact date is debatable, but around 1980, a nascent musical category emerged in the wake of punk rock: “alternative rock.”
Not so much a movement, “alternative” evolved into a label applied to bands who bucked the slick, mainstream music of the day. If disco divas like Donna Summer begged for some “Hot Stuff,” bands like Talking Heads bellowed what became a battle cry–“This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco.”
Almost two decades later, alternative rock has turned into pop music’s Lie of the ’90s.
Alternative has lost its meaning. The onetime underground movement surfaced and spread out long ago. When the Gap stocks flannel shirts, the trademark of Seattle grunge bands, the alternative has become the mundane.
Nonetheless, the style is crammed with exotic names that all are considered legitimate subtypes.
The list includes (take a deep breath): grunge, scrunge, industrial, ska, trip-hop, pop-punk, no depression (also called alternative country), jungle, dub reggae, lounge music, ambient, illbient, drum ‘n’ bass, recombinant and the latest craze, electronica.
Don’t feel out of touch if you don’t know electronica from a harmonica. Even music critics get dizzy tracing the changes. And once genres start disintegrating, so does their identity.
Be it bossa nova or British invasion, the pattern is roughly the same: innovators come, leave their mark, get bored and move onto something else.
What’s more, many bands typecast as such don’t consider themselves alternative. Musicians loathe labels. So who’s doing the typecasting? Perhaps the media, though seasoned critics know better. At this point, it’s major players in the music business.
What is alternative?
The answer has less to do with musical hair-splitting and more to do with the marketing machines that drive our society. To be sure, it is a valuable buzzword for powerhouse FM stations, big record companies and their ad agencies. That’s exactly the point: Alternative has become a slogan, a marketing niche, an attitude that demands a product line and anxious buyers to go along with it.
True, some artists make terrific music under the banner. Nor is it fair to single out alternative as the only branch of aggressively marketed music–virtually all the styles on the Billboard album charts get the same push.
But the con has more to do with how this music is hawked. The pitch goes something like this, and it’s a tune any ad exec worth his or her salt can hum: “You’re different. You’re ahead of the pack. You don’t follow the trends or the rules. No one tells you what to do or buy.” Chicago’s modern rock station WKQX-FM has even used the slogan “This is not for you,” swiped from a Pearl Jam lyric, much to the chagrin of the band.
The point is to be cutting edge, contrarian and make a statement, all at the same time. Do that and they’ll buy it, whether the product is music or Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Perhaps the best way to control rebellion is not to squash it, but to sell it. That way, rebels become consumers.
The trick for music peddlers, of course, is to make sure people chose their alternative and not somebody else’s. Given enough time, with enough alternatives and enough peddlers, the offbeat becomes middle of the road.
Modern rock at its hardest and loudest shoots for an adolescent demographic fully aware that kids feel the sharpest pangs of peer pressure. They want the most to fit in, to belong, to be alternative. It’s shrewd marketing: Be alternative–or else be on the outside, which is what, exactly? Post-mainstream? Neo-anti-trendy? Or just a misfit who doesn’t get it?
While the relationship between art and big money is nothing new, the ascendancy of rock illustrates the paradox vividly.
In 15th Century Italy, when the city of Florence experienced one of the greatest artistic flowerings in history, thanks to the largess of families like the Medicis. (A quick disclaimer–the goal here is not to compare Renaissance art to modern music, but to show how the money game has changed.) Over a mere 25 years, between 1400 and 1425, some of the most beautiful art of the Renaissance was produced, from Lorenzo Ghiberti’s “Gates of Paradise” to Donatello’s sculptures.
What happened? A renowned psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the University of Chicago, known for his work on “flow,” takes a stab at explaining in his latest book, “Creativity.”
“When the Florentine bankers, churchmen and heads of great guilds decided to make their city intimidatingly beautiful, they did not just throw money at artists to see what happened,” he writes. “They became intensely involved in the process of encouraging, evaluating and selecting the works they wanted to see completed.”
The people with the cash not only gave their artists freedom, but a remarkable mission: To produce great art that would glorify God and uplift their city. (The Florentines figured a beautiful city would stand up to invaders and time, and they were right; even the Nazis were reluctant to destroy its treasures.)
Art of any type needs incubation centers, hatcheries for novel ideas, as well as money to make them fly. Certainly, modern rock has had no shortage of creative wellsprings–Athens, Ga.; Seattle; Minneapolis; Austin, Texas, to name but a few.
In the early years of alternative music, these cities served as havens for artists, places where performers could bounce off ideas and create music largely for the love of it. Unlike Florence, there was not much money around, only determined bands and a few local zealots.
Then along came the big record labels, which respect creativity as long as it makes money. Unlike that of the Medicis, their money isn’t dedicated to making great art so much as a great investment with a high rate of return.
One could argue that only the great bands sell, but the truth is that few will survive if they don’t–unless they’re lucky enough to reach status. Like them or not, Hootie and the Blowfish will be with us until they stop selling.
Alternative sells, so why wouldn’t bands “go alternative?” SPIN magazine disparagingly refers to such groups as “scrunge” bands. It’s getting harder to tell the impostors from the originals, especially for the average music buff. The playing field has become too crowded.
Alanis Morissette was Canada’s teen-idol answer to Debbie Gibson before her makeover. Does that make her alternative or derivative? At first blush, substance would appear to be there: Her mega-selling album “Jagged Little Pill” is chock full of angry, raunchy lyrics, loud guitars and off-kilter vocal whoops, all trademarks of the supposed alternative sound. But could it be formula? Many arbiters of musical taste seem to think so, though Grammy Awards voters and her teenage fans would argue otherwise. But it’s worth noting that Morissette is a recording artist for Maverick, the record label partly owned by master image manipulator Madonna.
The continuing mission of art and artists, to paraphrase Pete Seeger, is not to imitate, but to point the way toward something new and innovative. That was the aim of alternative rock artists in the beginning.
As punk’s stepchildren, those first bands wanted to give bland pop music a well-deserved kick in the butt without buying into punk’s self-destructive ethos.
Alternative no longer does that. Most of its energy has drained to two opposite poles. On the one end, the bands ape: They adopt the fuzz- guitars-and-angst formula or borrow the in-your-face melodrama thirdhand from the likes of Morissette.
On the other end, bands go ape: They run in a thousand different directions, more for the sake of being quirky or retro than truly innovative. The genre splinters, and yet the label “alternative” persists, but perhaps not for long.
The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences–the organization that will award the Grammys next month–struggles to define what “alternative” means and has grown squeamish about batting around the label. The subject was a discussed at length at a recent NARAS trustees meeting in Los Angeles.
Other industry types also are hip to the music’s increasing moldiness. Scott Thomas, a former staffer at WDJB-FM in Ft. Wayne, Ind., summed it up perfectly some months ago in the radio trade publication, Friday Morning Quarterback:
“There’s such a saturation of alternative artists, it reminds me of the ’70s when all the record companies were signing every disco artist in sight.”
If alternative’s formal death comes soon, it may be at the hands of the very musical style it eclipsed. Clues are there.
U2, a seminal alternative band, has a new album due soon dominated by dance rhythms. In fact, word comes from the nerve centers in Los Angeles and New York that talent scouts anticipate a dance music revival.
Donna Summer would laugh. They’re looking for bands that play updated versions of disco.
