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I tend to enjoy a lot of music labeled under alt-rock or indie-rock, but what exactly categorizes them under those genres? Is it just less heavy than normal rock? How exactly do you distinguish a song as alternative?
EDIT: Thanks guys for the answers. From what I'm getting, Alternative is a term coined in the 80s for non-conforming styles in contrast to mainstream music at the time. It stuck around as a label for music, but it's lost some meaning over the years now that the whole environment of the industry has evolved. Is this right?
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It means alternative relative to what was mainstream specifically in the 80s.
This is correct. It's an outdated term, but it originally was a way to categorize rock bands that were mostly segregated to college radio / smaller venues.
There are a shitload of genres that don't really accurately describe the music, but refer to a sound or vibe that you have to be familiar with in the first place to recognize music as being from that genre. The other one mentioned by OP, indie rock, being one of the biggest offenders.
Most “indie” labels were just smaller labels owned by major ones.
That’s certainly the case now, but it never used to be. At least not in Britain.
Not in the 1980s.
For one thing, metal is not made of metal and rock is not made of rocks.
Acid jazz on the other hand....
i found it's best to look at the origins of the genre to understand the name, more than the style itself
AKA bands that were not signing with major labels and payola schemes to gain listeners?
But bigger than indie
It is, but most music I hear that fits the label is frozen in time.
While this is true, by the late eighties the term “alternative rock” also came to denote a more narrow style of music that typically involved hardcore punk being spliced with classic rock elements—like the Replacements, Husker Du, Soul Asylum, Soundgarden, Nirvana, etc (where alternative stops and grunge starts is another convoluted topic), with some adjacent bands like REM included as well. This is how in the nineties alternative and indie (which came to distinguish a less heavy sort of DIY style of non-mainstream rock) became different genres for the most part, and are still listed separately on Wikipedia, etc.
Sort of like how New Wave started as an umbrella term to describe punk, post punk and synth rock in the late seventies and eventually came to describe a more specific type of sound.
It gets really confusing.
Yes this, it was usually meant for indie, college rock, and imports from other countries. The Alternative Rock chart debuted in 1988.
I find it funny that nowadays Alternative Rock is more popular than the music it was an alternative to in the 80s.
Glam Metal is more alternative than Alternative Rock today.
Alternative to AOR and pop radio of the 1980's
In the 80's, there were a bunch of new genres that came out of the big rock seventies. Many of them gaining in popularity, but not as one big new thing. It was fractured and all over the style map. At the same time, radio was the big driver to mainstream pop culture, and radio was dominated by the shenanigans of major labels pushing the artists they had heavily invested in. As a result of the big labels dominating what gets played on the radio and which bands get recording deals; a grassroots independent record label scene was born. Labels where like minded genres would band together (pun intended) and record and publish themselves, as well as their own art, videos, and marketing.
Eventually there was enough indie label stuff that college radios were playing it for hours all day, and smaller music venues were filling up. By the time hair rock was getting pushed all over the airwaves in the late 80's , there was enough indie labels, indie bands, sub-genres, and regional music scenes that all of them kind of blew up huge over what seemed like a very short time period.
Grunge led the way on the charts, but a lot of this indie didn't fit in tight neat little corners like the few punk/grunge bands of the pacific northwest. Thus 'alternative' music was coined, it stuck, and the rest is history.
Out of that blow up from '88-92, radio stations dropped 'rock' and 'pop' of the 80's and went full time 'alternative radio' — as in something besides motley crue, michael jackson, and pink floyd.
If you want to experience the 'scene' before the term alternative came into play, just check out old recordings of MTV 120 minutes from the late 80's. That was pretty much a curated list of the top indie/alternative artists of the time.
This, yep! Rolling Stone used to publish a top 20!or whatever of different genres and “College Rock” was one, and I’d read it and see these weird bands I’d never heard of and I’m like what happens in college that you like weird unknown music? :)
And what’s funny is that legendary bands like The Cure and REM dominated this list. They got zero airplay anywhere in the eighties.
I heard REM pretty regularly on my regular "rock" radio station here in Norfolk, VA, particularly starting with "Superman" and "Fall On Me" in 1986. Buch more so when "The One I Love" came out in 1987, and every hit from then on. Perhaps we had a decent program manager, but they slipped the popular indie rock in with classic rock and hair metal.
Great writeup, thank you! I never really delved into stuff like this so this is super interesting to me. From my understanding now, which might be wrong, is that Indie/Alternative is more of a label put on underground music rather than mainstream. So does that mean it doesn't entail a specific sound, but more like anything that diverges more from the mainstream sound of the 80s? Does that mean if a band were to recreate the sound from the 80s, it would be considered non alternative?
something like pixies or smashing pumpkins probably hit the alternative sound hard, but yeah it wasn’t so much specific sound as much as the artist came up from the underground in smaller genres like punk, post, new wave, funk, goth, industrial, noise, thrash, etc.
so much of it really was just ‘rock’ - but it didn’t fit the version of rock that the major labels were pushing.
listen to dire straits. that’s an amalgamation of 80s non alternative rock.
The alternative radio station I listened to in the 90s has their top 91 songs for each year listed going back to 1983. It's a great way to see the transition from what was called "new wave" in the 80s to alternative in the 90s
https://www.91x.com/top-91/
what makes it alternative is its existence outside the “mainstream,” normally more eclectic, underground, or edgy. I think it traces back to the DIY punk scene of the late 70s/early 80s but i may be wrong on that
Punk was punk.
Alternative was more Smiths, R.E.M., Pixies, Talking Heads, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and that ilk.
It was alternative to stuff like Van Halen, Linda Ronstadt, Foreigner, Beatles, Frampton, Olivia Newton John, etc.
Alternative was also a thing in the 90s with what was essentially post-grunge pop-rock bands. Goo Goo Dolls, Third Eye Blind, the brit bands Oasis, Pulp, etc... In the rock world Alternative was maintsream in the mid to late 90s.
By this point it wasn’t because they were alternative to the mainstream, it’s because alternative had come to have its own sound.
As a teen in the mid 90s I clearly remember being immersed in Nirvana, Soundgarden, PJ, STP, NIN, Ministry, etc, all just on the radio. I didn't have much access to obscure music, so this was amazing. And like a fart in a hot boxed car, I remember that dreamy haze being shattered by bands like Del Amitri, Hootie, DMB, Matchbox 20 and we knew something was different. It was starting to suck ass. Our Waylon days were turning into John Denver days and the alt music scene had split, but radio didn't notice or care, and you'd hear Ministry backed up by a goddamed Sugar Ray song, or Sabotage by Beastie Boys would play, then 107.7 "The Edge" would follow up with a favorite from Spin Doctors. It was a weird era. If you were into rock, but not cocaine football rock, and had a penchanf for stuff like Front 242 or Nitzer Ebb, things kinda looked bleak, unless you had a good record store in your hometown. Thankfully we had one a couple towns over.
A lot of the bands you just cited grew out of the Punk movement. The Smiths, Siouxsie, REM, and Talking Heads all originated as Post-Punk, and the Pixies were straight-up Punk.
The Pixies are most certainly not punk. They’re the most direct precursor to grunge. They are the ur-example of alternative if there ever was one.
Softer side of punk I guess. It cracks me up with people call Talking Heads "punk." I'll definitely give ya Pixies. I knew I wasn't confident in that one as I was hitting the save button, but didn't care enough to hit edit. =)
For me it was Sex Pistols, Black Flag, Fear, Clash, Iggy and the Stooges, Ramones.
Nah; I go with the ‘punk as an ethos’ as opposed to ‘punk as a sound’ definition. I suppose ‘punk rock’ would be the last bands you mention, but Talking Heads ploughed their own furrow as much as (if not more than) ‘punk rock’ bands.
In the mid-late 70s, punk was more of a way to lump all ‘alternative’ bands. The alternative to the dominant Arena rock (Zepplin, KISS, etc) These ‘punk’ bands all performed in the same rock clubs (sometimes in the same night) and didn’t conform to mainstream sensibilities. Believe it or not, even a guy like Prince (early career) would be considered part of this scene. They were all catering to the same crowd.
This changed by the early 80’s as hardcore punk began to galvanize into a sound and a scene and dozens of third and fourth wave bands began to emulate it (leading into a dead-end genre by the end of the decade).
Originally?
They were called alternative because there was no other title currently in use to describe them.
That makes sense. Are there new terms for the sub-genres? For instance I looked up the genre for The Neighbourhood songs, but they just say Alternative rock.
I dislike the way some people insist on categorizing everything.
It hurts new bands more than it helps them.
I strongly disagree, how does somebody find your new band in the sea of available music online without any terminology that points you in their direction? Even in a physical store, if you're looking for certain types of music would you rather just manually look through an alphabetically sorted system or would you want there to be at least SOME degree of grouping based on sound?
It's one thing to go 'That's not real X music because blah blah blah" and another entirely to say "This band blends XYZ genres, so if you're looking for those then you should check this out".
I've always felt this way about all art. For hard sciences, categorization is necessary and extremely helpful. But art and music are so fluid.
Like where does punk end and metal begin? Is it that punk uses less riffs and more chords? Then where do you put riff heavy punk bands like Strung Out? Is it the drumming? Then where do you put Bands with super heavy drummers like Avail or Minor Threat?
It's all just music. Terms like "heavy" and "poppy" are helpful, but how do you describe something like Radiohead? You just have to listen to them. If you want to describe a band, it's easier just to list some of their influences and the general feel of the music.
I don’t think labels or categories are useless or anything when it comes to art, it definitely helps people follow the things that they like and helps with talking about them too. Let’s not pretend that every artist is so unique that there’s nothing we can do to link them together, genres exist whether we give them a name or not.
However they are very fluid, they shouldn’t be used so rigidly. Like you said it’s impossible to know exactly where one genre ends and another begins, but we can assign a genre or set of genres to something mostly just by feeling it out, it isn’t a science at all and shouldn’t be.
Think about modest mouse, red hot chili peppers, the talking heads, blues traveler, the pixies
As a teenager in the ‘80s when “alternative” got its start, to me the term referred to any guitar-based or guitar-based-adjacent music that didn’t follow “standard” pop or rock structure in a number of ways. Either it was lyrically unintelligible (example: the Cocteau Twins); lyrically too morose/dark for mainstream radio’s relatively upbeat sound (example: The Smiths); thematically too dense/obscure compared to the uncomplicated lyrics heard on mainstream radio (example: Echo and the Bunnymen); vocal delivery well outside the range of “normal” singing (example: The Cure); or song structures straying outside of the standard, sing-along 3-5 minute verse-chorus-verse-chorus-fade with recognizable “hooks” (example: Bauhaus).
Basically, if it was something you’d play and the average person would look at you funny and say “that sounds weird” then that was “alternative.”
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That station indirectly funded Barenaked Ladies’ first album. BNL won a contest sponsored by CFNY, and used the prize money to pay for the recording sessions.
Alternative is more of an umbrella term for music at this point. It had more meaning before genres were being created left & right in the late 20th century, and certain music was often labeled as "alternative" because it didn't fit the mold for the common denominator of musical ingenuity within the genre.
Does the music check off x, y & z for the genre's typical sense of development, or does it do that and more? If it's the latter, it's alternative, but again, the term doesn't have much meaning as it used to because of how many subgenres there are now.
Peter Buck responded to someone calling REM alternative by saying “What’s the alternative to music? Silence?”.
I see, that makes sense! Thanks for the answer
Rock radio in the 1980's was Loverboy/Def Leppard/Springsteen/Van Halen/Boston/AC-DC/Mellencamp/Aerosmith/Tom Petty/ZZ Top/Journey/Foreigner/Whitesnake and so on.
If you weren't acceptable on big market rock radio, you were alternative. Violent Femmes are an example; they are better known today than when they came out.
After Nirvana the distinction broke down as rock stations opened up to the upstarts.
It blows my mind to hear The Cure being played on many different radio stations today. I never would have thought that they would become a mainstream acceptable band.
It was the alternative to late 80’s hair bands.
Back in the 80s it meant it was an alternative to hair metal and “virtuoso” guitar wankery.
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yeah commerciality is the thing I still associate it with: in my mind, alternative is made as art first and as a product second.
Sony, Warner, and Universal are the big 3 major labels. They each own a bunch of smaller sub labels and control about 92% of the music industry. This means pretty much every mainstream artist either works for or is distributed by one of the big 3 labels. You don't really get on the radio or tv or movies without being affiliated to the mainstream corporate industry.
In the early 80s the DIY punk scene developed. Teenagers started their own labels with blackjack & hookers where they made their own music, put on their own shows, did their own marketing, and distributed it themselves. It started picking up until the major labels appropriated the culture in the early 90s.
Alternative music is independent music that is created outside of the mainstream corporate industry. It doesn't even have to be punk or whatever, it's just music that isn't owned by the major labels.
Most people think it's about the style. For me it's about ownership.
Oh I see, that's an interesting way to see it. Does this mean modern mainstream artists than brand themselves as alternative disingenuous?
Pretty much yeah.
Like, you can go start a band right now and play a show in someone's basement or wherever and technically it is 'alternative' music because it's outside of the mainstream corporate industry.
There is the 'alternative aesthetic' which most people think of when they hear the word. That style developed in the underground scene then was just resold as mainstream corporate trends for edgy kids. Like, emo was originally kind of happy.
I think most of these labels are simply marketing
Nothing. Its a bullshit titled placed to differentiate music from less main stream music. I have never heard a band say they were alternative
It's an umbrella term for music that isn't necessarily popular or mainstream. When grunge took over in the 90s, I feel like the lines were crossed so much that alternative music really is just normal since then.
Alternative means little nowadays, but it used to be defined as rock that wouldn’t get played much on mainstream radio because it didn’t check the boxes to be the popular music of the time.
As someone else pointed out below, originally it came from music stores throwing the weird non-radio rock that was popular with college, punk and goth crowds into a sort of “miscellaneous-but-in-a-cool-you-are-in-the-know” label. Making that stuff easier to find.
Then somehow nirvana screwed everything up and made alternative, individuality, and substance-over-style-but-the-style-is-don’t-conform-but-kinda-do to be what’s in style.
It’s amazing - I went to college in 92, my high school yearbook is full of kids all wearing hilfiger polos and braided belts. Next year, kids all wear whatever, from t-shirts to flannels to retro metal to skater/hiphop giant jeans to just.. variety. Alternative literally became default thanks to nirvana and all the good music they opened doors for.
Nothing anymore lol 😅we all knew it was a dumb name when the media started calling it that too. It’s Nirvanas fault technically lol.
Aesthetic and ethical descendants of the Velvet Underground
I’ll chip in by saying it includes things like alternate guitar tuning (drop D is a classic in grunge) , unconventional song structures, different lyrical tones (going for intentionally I dunno sloppy like punk or drab like nirvana), different lyrical content (talking about depression, abuse etc more overtly than the prettied up metaphors of the mainstream), and so on.
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Opposite of synths. That was mainstream pop.
i was just thinking of music things synths are cool tho
So early alternative was a backlash against the popular hair metal bands and synth pop bands from the late 80s
ohh i see
How could early alternative be a backlash against bands from the late 80s? Alternative was basically fully fledged by then. Joy Division, The Cure, Talking Heads all formed by 1978 and so did Wire, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Grunge definitely was a backlash against hair metal and synth pop but grunge isn’t early alternative. It came around 13 years after alternative started.
More like alternative guitar tuning (like drop D) and unconventional song structures and even to an extent lyrics that covered topics not usually part of the mainstream
At the time. The music of era was very pop oriented and r&b. Lots of music that was made to dance to. This was alternative to that.
To me, Pop, Alternative and Indie are three words that don't describe musical qualities of a song.
Rather they describe what they are from a sociological and economical point of view.
All music is alternative if its a replacement for other music.
"All books are children's books if the child can read!"-Mitch Hedberg, RIP
When off-rock first became known to the public, it differentiated itself from regular Rock with more complex lyrics and chords less driving guitar Earth Rock could be more introspective than regular rock and much less boastful. Lots of off-rock were on Indie labels, unlike regular rock, which tended to be under the big corporate labels of the time
Aside from the definition, it also tends to have certain stylistic elements on guitar. Cleaner guitars with less distortion. Mostly standard tuning. Can use weird chords that a lot of other rock music doesn’t. The arpeggios are generally pretty simple. A range of tempos but most are pretty quick. Strumming patterns and timing can be really rigid.
I’m obviously generalizing, but these traits are pretty common.
Words used to describe music are coined at a certain time, but continue to refer to that time later. The term Modernism was created in the early 20rh century to describe what was then a modern style. It's one hundred years later, and Modernism still means a style of music from the 1920s. New Wave was coined in the 1970s to refer to a new wave of music following punk rock which infused some punk elements in more accessible pop styles. Today, new wave still means that style from the 70s and 80s. Progressive rock refers to music that was considered progressive in the 60s and 70s. And so on.
Kickboy Face, in the Decline of Western Civilization, says new wave doesn't exist. It's a thing people say when they want to say, oh I don't listen to boring old fashioned rock and roll, of course, but you don't want to say punk because the people will look at you funny and throw you out of the party and not give you coke anymore.
"Alternative" is the "new wave" of the 90s. It could be anything except for boring old rock and roll. It's at least got to be dressed up a bit.
I have no idea. I never understood it then, and I don't now.
Yeah it seems a bit ambiguous to me, but I suppose it's hard to categorize songs nowadays since there's so much experimentation.
Alternative (any genre) is music that is not considered the most common representative examples of a genre. It's usually a little 'difficult' or has some elements that are too individual to be considered part of a genre's usual makeup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_rock
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_Airplay
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_rock
It began as a relative term, but stuck as an absolute one.
I actually can’t stand what radio stations call alternative now
it was a push back against hair metal/glam metal, from how i remember it. it was more than music. it was attitude and style and vibe and all that. glam/hair metal was about crazy excess and these guys came in and was like, i'm not a rock star, i'm depressed, let's do heroin and fucking die. that's what it felt like. and it fucking rocked so hard. it felt authentic.
The original Alternative rack in record stores was supposed to be an alternative to music. I got S.O.D. and D.R.I. first LPs out of it. I think there was a Crumbsuckers album there, too, but I didn't know who they were, yet.
Besides the DIY factor in the beginning, I like to think that stylistically, alternative is an umbrella term for anything too "weird" or "left of the dial" for classic rock or active rock oriented stations(not including genres like prog rock in this for obvious reasons). May or may not involve the usual bass-drums-guitar setup, but guitar playing is usually more textural, restrained and clean toned with less "dino distortion". That's far from universal though.
Wooooow "left of the dial" is a term that is almost lost to history. I'm getting old.
Alternative is anything that's not pop:
Doesn't talk about love or relationship
Doesn't clock under 5mn
Doesn't follow the pattern words-chorus-words-chorus-variation-chorus
Doesn't follow the 4-2 major minor pattern.
Basically, it's a song structure that lets the author express themselves without constraints.
It started as an "Alternative to Pop/Rock"
pompous media
It’s all about marketing
In the UK typically it refers to bands who produce rock music that is not based on the blues. So most of Radiohead but also Nirvana (at least the first two albums) in contrast to the Foo Fighters. Oddly enough a lot of Thin Lizzy in the Jailbreak era also counts.
It's a brand thing
Pretty much, your edit. I'm 56 and have listened from the 70's to now. I have Band Camp for exploring new music.