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.