Alternative to What? Music

Remember the '90s?  For some reason, I've been stuck there a lot lately.  One reason is a game called "SongPop."  Since I'm still pretty new to the game, I don't have a lot of playlists to pick from, so the "90s Alternative" playlist comes up very often.

In the nineties, if you wanted to sound like a Cool Kid when someone asked you what kind of music you liked, you'd affect a pose of slouchy not-caring-ness and shrug and say 'I like Alternative,' and everybody knew what you meant.  Except before I even graduated from high school, "Alternative" was more like "Allthereistoturnthedialto."

Even at the time, it was hard to really put a finger on "Alternative," because everybody called themselves "Alternative."  Everybody was rebelling against some machine, but few of us knew what it was we were rebelling against.

I never gave it much thought back then.  I just liked the music.  I'd grown up listening to the Beach Boys and Elvis and the Beatles, all great, great music, but something about listening to "Alternative" music made squeaky-clean, goody-two-shoes me feel a little badass.  But this game, which puts U2 and Joan Osborne and Nirvana and Duran Duran on the same playlist for us to guess the songs, got me wondering just how something so ubiquitous, and in a lot of cases commercial, could have ever been called "Alternative."

I didn't have it then, but now, I have the power of the Internet, so I checked around.  'Alternative' music, as it turns out, began as a term for music that started out with independent labels, which a surprising number of acts did.  And it became a catch-all to mean anything from independent rock to college rock to postmodern to post-punk.  It's one of those terms that's a big, overstuffed, jumbled-up duffelbag that means everything and nothing.

Alternative to what?

You get older, and get more confident in your own tastes, and care less about being a Cool Kid.  It's not enough explanation to drawl "Alternative" when someone asks you what music you like, especially if you're stuck in a car with someone and you don't have the sand to put on your earbuds and listen to your own iPod.  Say you tell them you like "Alternative," thinking music in the vein of Nirvana, and Smashing Pumpkins, and U2, and what you get instead is four hours of "Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?"  That right there would make me think about throwing myself from a vehicle moving at highway speeds, before even the first "Yippie-yi, Yippie-yay!"  Especially now, since we're kind of out of the "Alternative" movement, and can look back and see borders between the different kinds of music that huddled under the "Alternative" festival tent in the '90s.

And since we've passed the decade point of the passing of the 1990s, it's even okay to admit that you didn't really care much for the Alternative Music of the 1990s at all.  Nobody's going to trip you in the lunchroom over it.  And if they do, they're the ones with issues, not you.  I don't fall into the camp that didn't like any of the music back then.  I have very strong likes and dislikes, and even some music from then I'm tepid about.  But I do have to say, I couldn't stand it when everybody wore flannel shirts for every occasion.  And 90s hair frustrated me to no end, with all its half-hearted, sulky, dirty lifeless flatness.  I'm a big-hair, lots of makeup girl.  I'm really more glam-rock than grunge, so in that respect, and also with Ace of Base factored in, and the whole junior high thing, the 90s were a little bit of a personal Hell for me in some ways.

So no matter how old you are, like the music you like, and I'll like the music I like.  If the Nineties taught us anything, it's that if you don't like what's on this station, you have Alternatives.