since nobody answered (or even seemed to notice) my question concerning what 'alternative' music really is, on the Coldplay thread (and since it seems to be a question worth asking) i thought i'd bring up the topic again in its own thread.

it would seem to me that classifying any band, album, or song as 'alternative' would depend upon two main criteria: unconventional style and independent label. in this way bands like The White Stripes (recycled sound on an indie label) and Beck (definitely used to be doing his own thing on a major label) can be seen as much more middle of the road than say...Mogwai (original sound on a...big, indie label).

these criteria can also be conveniently applied to bands that were once unusual and interesting, but then crossed over to the mainstream, like say the more well know groups of the Seattle Grunge movement (Soundgarden, Nirvana, Pearl Jam). their early stuff remains alternative while their latter day sins are chaulked up from embarrassing to unfogiveable. just look at what Chris Cornell (his solo album was laughable and Audioslave is total garbage), Dave Grohl (The Foo Fighters haven't made a decent album or written a good song in seven years), and all of Pearl Jam (two and half good albums) are doing now compared with fifteen years ago.

thoughts?

that's a way of seeing it... although recently the term mainstream alternative or alternative mainstream has cropped up to describe such bands who are not blatantly pop and commercial, but are still on a big label and sell a lot (Radiohead for example)

anyway the term alternative on itself can more or less be defined as the same: everything that is not so blatantly commercial and popular, but of course it's still pretty vague...

euphoria morning was brilliant


audioslave is indeed total garbage...

I basically call things alternative when I don't know where else to put them.

i remember hearing someone refer to gwen stefani as alternative the other day, oh how it made me giggle it seems these days that 'alternative' just means white, and 'urban' means black. what a silly state of affairs...

Yeah "alternative" has certainly been abused over the years. I use genre specifications for my own purposes now on my Ipod, even though I know it many cases the label I put on songs isn't even close to accurate. That's how little meaning genre names have for me these days. I could just call them "subgenre A" or "Subgenre B".

To me, alternative was outside the lines of established genre boundaries. Most of what was initially called alternative was really just rock music that didn't sound like Santana. I'll use "Alt Rock" to nail a specific set of styles down (Stereolab, Bjork, Curve, etc) but to me "Alternative" always meant stuff like Laurie Anderson, Phew, Mr Bungle, Uz Jsme Doma stuff you really can't nail down. Some of it resides around the Avant-Garde vicinity.

Everything I've ever understood about "alternative" music is that it primarily refers to post-punk styles, which, at the time of their onset, were major alternatives to what had been on radio for the previous 20 years. The term didn't reallly find use until the '80s in reference to underground bands playing punk-influenced music like Dinasaur Jr., Sonic Youth, The Pixies, Husker Du, etc, and this sound eventually mades its way into the mainstream '90s, the decade of "everything with a guitar being alternative" (( I think panbient said that. )). This is why we have mainstream "alternative" music at all, and why the big bands of the early '90s grunge scene are still refered to as "alternative". It has nothing to do w/ record labels so much as the sound and influence of the music, it just happened that the early "alternative" acts were on independent labels (( this is why the terms "indie", "underground", "experimental", etc exist today )). Anyway, that's what I've always understood of it.

Of course, termonology often finds use far beyond their original meanings.