Gold Soundz

The Alternative Rock Era (1980s-2000s)

If you don’t know who this band is, STOP BREATHIN’!

On Wednesday January 17th, Anna Wintour announced that Pitchfork was going to be “folded into” GQ. Many great think pieces have been written about the implications. This is not one of them. This story is strictly being used as a news hook for something I wanted to write about before the announcement: the alternative rock era itself.

If you are wondering why I say the alternative rock era doesn’t end the day this change was declared, I would make the analogy that saying that is like saying jazz died when Kenny G. released his first album in an unbroken string of releases that would not hit the top ten of the Billboard Top 200. ¹ Jazz was already losing its cultural relevance in the ‘60s and by the ‘80s the arrival of smooth jazz trash like Kenny G. marked the time of jazz’s actual death.

The truth is, most things culturally die without anybody noticing until it’s too late. It’s like if a person dies and no one notices until that person’s house is up for sale. Pitchfork is that house. Although even in the ‘10s, Pitchfork has already pivoted from a site about indie rock to a site about masochistic white guilt for bearded white men in their 30s singing the praises of Tay and Bey in service of the Poptimist God.

But we are not gathered here today to solve the murder. We are here to look back at what we lost. If we can circle back to the analogy where I compare indie rock to a person, its mother was ‘60s rock and its father punk rock. Both of its parents were vibrant countercultures. The mother had its global impact felt immediately. The father had its countercultural impact felt in the UK in the ‘70s and was successfully prevented stateside from creating an angry dangerous counterculture. DJs literally could not be paid to play the stuff, even in NYC.²

So here, we see the subcultural roots of the alt era. Like punk, alternative rock primarily gurgled underground in the US. It must be mentioned that indie rock did hit big in the UK, but unlike the British Invasion of the ‘60s, the impact was felt in America only in colleges. What needs to be at the forefront of any discussion of alternative rock is the fact that, contrary to previous subcultures, or contrary to its parents of ‘60s rock and punk, alternative rock (which had its first relatively widespread manifestation in America as “college rock”) was focused on aesthetics, with barely a memory of revolution, let alone a mention of it.

The alternative rock format was almost exclusively centered around radio at the beginning. In the early part of the decade, it thrived in static-y college radio stations. From the mid-’80s on, new wave radio stations and/or shows pivoted from new wave to the “modern rock” format and eventually to the “alternative rock” format. As older yuppies flaunted their good taste by owning BMWs and espresso machines, college kids peacocked by owning records by Elvis Costello and The Replacements.

All this may seem relatively shallow on the surface: how can anyone take consumer choices so seriously? The context of MTV in the 1980s will suffice, especially when it comes to rock music. Of all the ‘80s pop trends, hair metal is one that consistently fails to have a positive reevaluation, despite Chuck Klosterman’s best efforts. Liberals resent the retrograde sexist messaging of songs like Winger’s “Seventeen” and Warrant’s “Cherry Pie.” Conservatives never liked the androgynous make-up and feminine poofy hair of the musicians themselves. Everyone can only muster up ironic appreciation for the “do they know this is funny” music videos. Many of them were the only rock videos that MTV kept playing in the ‘80s, especially in the late ‘80s.

thanks to

Salty K. Pickles

for introducing this to me

Alternative rock in the ‘80s wasn’t a direct, resounding rebuttal to this type of music — or to Cold War-era patriotism in general — but rather a disillusioned avoidance of these things. Bands like R.E.M. and The Jesus and Mary Chain looked back to the ‘60s more than keeping up with current trends. Or, to paraphrase another jaded cultural figure, they were boats beating against the current back into the past.

By 1991, female executives at MTV like Judy McGrath³ were tired of the hair metal stranglehold and fought for bands like R.E.M. and Nirvana to get on MTV in heavier rotation. Still, we must credit Nirvana themselves for the grand slam that was “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” In all my life, I have never seen a cultural watershed/vibe-shift moment this cataclysmic. Teens that wore denim jackets in 1991 wore flannel in 1992. It’s like when people describe the hippie look that first appeared in 1965. This was after the Cold War, so perhaps that explains why, even with the grunge revolt and Seattle being the new capitol of America, it was more of an aesthetic revolution than a political or even a cultural one.

Much like I have said that centering your revolution on TikTok is not wise, centering your revolution on one TV channel is a good way to lose. As soon as MTV played Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, they played Stone Temple Pilots, Candlebox, Silverchair and Bush. Grunge and post-grunge practically existed at the same time. Post-grunge successfully diluted and contained the revolution, clearing the coast for Britney Spears and N’Sync. For the rest of the ‘90s, the more authentic indie rock was to be discussed in zines, magazines like Spin and…online publications like Pitchfork.

Yes, the band in the first picture above is Pavement.

Perhaps fitting the whole ethos of the alternative rock era, the best alternative/indie rock thrived in the mildew of the post-grunge distraction. While mall alt-kids bought their Green Day and Offspring albums, bands like Pavement and Guided by Voices released genre-defining masterpieces like Slanted and Enchanted, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Propeller and Bee Thousand.

When we look at the alternative rock era (at this point it rebranded itself as “indie” to distinguish itself from post-grunge like Creed) in the ‘00s, it is worth mentioning that the hipsters of this time created an alternative canon of ‘90s legends. Much like the punk crowd in the ‘70s gave their reappraisal of the ‘60s, where The Stooges and The Velvet Underground were feted above the Beatles and the Stones, the ‘00s hipsters preferred ‘90s bands like Yo La Tengo and Flaming Lips⁴ to Nirvana and Pearl Jam.

None of this is to say that the alternative — sorry, “indie” rock⁵ — rock of the ‘00s was without its icons. The New Pornographers, The Shins, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Grizzly Bear, Arcade Fire, The Fiery Furnaces, TV on the Radio, The White Stripes, LCD Soundsystem, The Mountain Goats, Broken Social Scene and many others came from this time. Few of these acts broke through to any major radio airplay, but they had mainstream attention. In the ‘00s, indie hipster culture practically was the culture of the entire Internet . But the Internet of the ‘00s was small enough that Internet fame could more easily lead to attention from the suits. The songs from this era, which might not have been played on mainstream radio, would end up in TV commercials, indie films and eventually the place where this music would retire: TV shows. One of the few things prestige TV and network sitcoms had in common was the indie needledrop. Now, Hollywood had a touch of sexy indie cred and the indie artists had royalties for years.

Indie rock was once again praised in mainstream publications online and off, especially Pitchfork, for almost a decade. Though Kelefa Sanneh’s influential article about poptimism was published in 2004, it wouldn’t be until the Black Lives Matter movement was in full swing, and Tumblr/Twitter liberals spoke like ‘80s college students, that poptimism would be popular. Indie rock was too white and too insular.

As much as I love indie rock, these annoying hashtag hippies were right: the moment had passed. Even though indie rock was popular during the Iraq War, the newly-enacted Patriot Act scared most artists from major political statements (unless they were major corporate-backed celebrities like Jon Stewart). By the time of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, however, the pain hit too close to home to go unanswered. Indie rock, mainly being white, would save support for BLM for their tweets, wisely letting black musicians talk about their struggle. Pitchfork, as previously mentioned, fell under the poptimism spell and retroactively added albums from minorities to their best-of lists.

In this moment, we have no alternative rock. What we have instead is absolute cultural stasis. ⁶ From the ‘00s to now, there hasn’t been much difference culturally (besides the demise of indie rock, which itself thrived in the margins). Already in the ‘00s Mark Fisher mentioned how the future was disappearing. If you listen to the indie rock of this era, much of it is completely retro, very little of it adding anything different. The game was referring to relatively obscure pop ephemera of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, much like Tarantino made a career out of quoting obscure kung-fu and blaxploitation films. As this quoting expanded to pop culture in general (most brazenly in Hollywood, of course, with its endless reboots) Simon Reynolds called the phenomenon “retromania.”

We can compare the cultural stasis of our current moment to that of the ‘40s up until and including the very early ‘60s. The latter was in the grip of the High Imperial aesthetic. It would take the political and social tumult of the ‘60s to require an answer from the artists of its time. Our current moment needs something similarly seismic culturally to happen.

Next week I am being asked to speak at an online salon (my first ever) hosted by

Rachel Haywire

. The theme of the salon is how underground cultural movements can survive now, like they did in the Weimar (or of course during the alternative rock era). My hot take: an underground mesoculture would be good to gestate wonderful revolutionary art, but now is not the time to preserve this work underground. When it is ready, it must be battle-tested, much like the ‘60s rock and ‘70s punk was. Unlike the ‘80s that birthed alternative rock, there are massive revolutionary currents right now and mousy, lo-fi beta male indie rock simply will not suffice.

But neither will the status-quo pop that, after years of wokewashing itself, has been exposed for its moral cowardice. The runners of Coachella themselves seem hip to how current pop is passing its moment. Only problem: now they are hiring TikTok-famous rock/pop acts that will not sell a lot of tickets. Coachella is trying to reclaim its place as a festival that breaks new acts. But that’s the dilemma most music festivals face now: the pop acts are too overexposed to generate excitement. The new musicians have not had enough venues and/or experience to warrant inclusion on a festival line-up. Young musicians, like young revolutionaries in general, are in danger of working only on their TikTok presence, which is why the rest of the Internet looked at the current Coachella flyer and said “Who?”

But, as promised, this is not a murder investigation, rather a memorial, even a celebration. Though we can see now that an artistic revolution rooted purely in consumerism is as weak as a political revolution rooted in electoralism, those of us who were young during those years cannot be blamed for being misty eyed when we remember the feeling we had when we believed that the new great indie rock song we heard would be the one to turn denim to flannel again.

Next week no stack. Please support me at the salon!

1. Wishes: A Holiday Album, 2002

2. We can even say punk is to alternative rock what ragtime is to jazz. Though the revolutionaries of the 1910s loved ragtime and the UK rebels loved punk, history will remember jazz and alternative rock way more vividly.

3. Who ironically worked at Cone Nast before joining MTV. Conde Nast being the company that bought Pitchfork in 2015 and killed it this month.

4. Yes they ACKSHUALLY started in the ‘80s but they hit their creative strides in the ‘90s you gate-keeping clod

5. Even though many of these bands were on major labels, or vanity labels for major labels anyway

6. Three great links