What Is Alternative Rock?

What Is Alternative Rock Music?

This is a rather interesting case history as Alternative Rock was a direct response to what was seen, at that time, as the commercialization of Rock and Pop music. I have previously posted articles on this blog having to do with what was originally a counter culture effort being seized and utilized by business interests.

This was simply big business recognising that a market existed in the supposed youth culture and effectively attacking it to the point where the youth culture reigned supreme and other age groups became marginalized.

Alternative Rock can properly be considered a subgenre of basic Rock n’ Roll. It began in the nineteen seventies and became more popular in the eighties and nineties. Some of the groups that got the ball rolling, so to speak, were R.E.M., The Smiths and Nirvana. Wikipedia has a very detailed article about this era.

In defining what they were doing, Alternative Rock groups introduced different other musical elements into the rock format, stylistic types of things such as Punk Rock, Hard Rock and Folk.

The basic sound of this movement contained hard driven guitar, experimental kinds of vocals, alternative time signatures and variations on the basic verse, chorus, verse that was the standard song form in Rock and Pop.

As a response to the commercialization of Rock and Pop, Alternative Rock became the new voice of cultural defiance and social commentary.

Equally important was the recognition that, as good as a particular musical movement may have been, there is always a need to move on to something else, rather than keeping on with the same thing. This is the story of music history. Great composers always saw the need to change things up from what was going on previously. Those who simply followed the current trends were quickly swallowed up by history.

Comments

Learn Music

You Can Learn Music Perhaps you’ve gone to a concert and fantasized about being able to ‘shred’ on a guitar, like the lead guitarist you were listening to. Or maybe you were listening to some artist on the piano and you wished that you could play the piano like that. What usually holds the average person back is what I call the ‘myths’ that abound in and around music. They mostly exist around learning music, since anyone who has succeeded in mastering an instrument has learned the falsehood of these myths. One of the most prevalent myths is that you need to have ‘talent’ to play an instrument and, if you don’t, well, just forget about it. The other very prevalent myth is that you need great sacrifice and must spend years and many hours a day to learn an instrument. The third thing that really messes people up is tying into some really bad teaching ideas. What do I mean by this? Well, learning an instrument is really no different than learning any other sort of skill. I like to compare...

Mother/Short Story Excerpt

Mother Ian adjusted his field glasses and looked out at the arid wasteland that started just under his chin and stretched out to the horizon. Behind him the jungle stopped abruptly as if something had taken a great chunk out of the Home World, leaving the white sand dropping away and turning to ochre as it approached the horizon under the setting sunlight. Behind him there were bird calls, in front of him only the occasional sizzle of sand running downwards. It wasn’t natural, something had created it and Ian kept wondering what it was. He was pretty certain that there was a deep crater or canyon out there in the middle of this desert as you would see plumes of dust rising vertically once in a while, but it was impossible to say if this was a sign of Others or just air currents kicking up. There was no going out there to see though, as the desert was still one of the many Forbidden...

Musical Trends And Composers Who Ignored Them

Composers Who Ignored Musical Trends When we think about the concept of musical trends we think of our present age since we have a vast media that keeps us up to date with the latest musical trend. Billboard and social media keep us up to date on what the latest trends are. It's interesting that musical trends apparently existed as far back as the sixteen hundreds. This is when the composer J. S. Bach lived and wrote music and in his day and age the musical public was mad for Italian opera. This is traced in an interesting article on Facebook called Musical Context in Bach's Era. Bach did not follow this trend but wrote his own style of music which was a complex sort of music involving counterpoint which is the play between melodies. He also made reforms in the musical tuning system which paved the way for later composers such as Beethoven and Mozart to create the highly expressive music that they did. We find at a later time Mozart running into a similar thing when he wanted...

Writings of Brian Lee Beshore

Search This Blog