‘alternative’ is the dumbest music genre

posted by jeffdoge
February 22, 2021, 4:57 PM

I grew up listening to self described alternative rock radio stations and was my introduction to becoming passionate about any sort of music. By this time, 2010, what was called alternative was a catch all for all subgenres of rock music that would get radio play. The station I listened to did little to hide this, like many alternative stations I later realized they would also have include the most basic of classic rock that boomers loved, big hits from led zeppelin, gun n roses and ac/dc etc. These were the type of bands that alternative rock was marketed as the original alternative towards in the 90s. No alternative rock station playlist mixed well, they would play a bob marley song then segue it into some of the most crass, sometimes objectively sexist, post grunge hits of the times

what i’m talking about shown through some choice cuts:

Post grunge was the epitome of the meaningless use of alternative, this was as derivative as rock music could get. Bands like seether, three days grace, shinedown even nickelback lol were under this label, they all shared a mimicking of 90s grunge music from eddie Vedder or kurt cobain's vocal deliveries, the soft verse to loud chorus composition with much more overproduced, 2000s brickwalled production, a return to the masturbatory guitar solos that grunge supposedly made passe, absolutely mindless lyrics & little fucking with the formula. It's understated the interesting aspects of grunge, nirvana started out with a near sludge metal heavy sound and experimented with noise rock as seen with cobain’s respect of steve albini, soundgarden managed to combine the sound of doom metal with underground punk bands like the butthole surfers. post grunge turned the idea of what was alternative in the 90s into just an aesthetic, dumbed down & made it purely commercialized. Not counting pop punk/emo and the more nu-metal influence rock groups, this was the most successful and often heard type of rock music growing up, this really was the 2000s mirror of what hair metal must have sounded like to gen x.

My memory is of alternative rock stations to transition from this dominance on post grunge to the highly polished, electronic heavy pop sound. MGMT blowing up around 2009 was the turning point with many bands following that reintroduced synths & electronics over guitars & a surprisingly large amount of the biggest pop hits of the last decade gained regular play on these stations, a complete 180 to what I was hearing just a year or so prior.

Some examples:

Of course you can lump imagine dragons in this too which to this day I believe nearly all alternative stations play ad nauseam, genuinely one of the most overproduced, fake sounding music possible. I'm convinced their music has to be algorithmically determined by a modern day Brill Building of professional songwriters analyzing what lyrics will create the biggest pop song.What exactly is imagine dragons alternative to when every one of their singles end up used in commercials and sports games. 2000s alternative had the issue that thinking any guitar based rock group = alternative, for the 2010s I really don't know what kind of definition is used anymore nor the kind of audience. Just taking a glance billie elish & post malone is considered alternative by these stations and is played between the same 90s hits from nirvana and green day that appear to still be played daily. The modern songs played on these stations probably alienate the aging gen xers who think grunge was the peak of rock music and hate anything pop sounding and the people my age they're trying to target just doesn't want to hear the same shitty stone temple pilots song played whenever they hear these stations. Of course radio is just an old people’s mode of listening but what’s considered alternative today really doesn’t form any cohesive demographic as far as i could tell, it’s a very strange classification of music the more i think about it.

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