What happened when REM went mainstream | Hacker News Reader

What happened when REM went mainstream

yalereview.org

69 pointsjohnshades86 comments

Way back when, the big story about REM was that the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, wanted “It’s the end of the world” for his advertising blitz for windows 95. REM, they said, told him to take a hike so he had to settle for the Rolling Stones “Start Me Up” instead. Windows 95 was culturally pretty big.

Turning down a very large sum of money suggests you believe something in a way that simply lecturing others doesn’t.

I don’t know what the members of REM believe, probably not all the same thing. But whatever it is, maybe they do really believe it. That counts for something. Contrast Mick Jagger & Keith Richards.

That was plausibly a commercial decision as much as anything else. I mean, Tom Petty famously refused to license his music, too. You can read in this article a good description of why a band might not want to dilute themselves that way: once you hear a band playing in the background at a department store, you can't un-hear that.

Plausibly, sure. Almost any decision is given people sometimes make terrible commercial decisions. We should acknowledge that the Windows 95 international saturation marketing blitz to the sound of "Start Me Up" failed to end the Stones. Sometime after that they did a concert film directed by Martin Scorsese, a movie featuring hanging out with Bill & Hillary Clinton and they also still seem to sell out 80,000 seat arenas playing their octogenarian loud blues. It seems slightly more plausible to me that the Stones made a commercial decision but again, maybe it was purely artistic or ethical because people also sometimes make terrible decisions on the basis of those motivations.

In the end we can't prove we exist and we deal in probabilities given evidence.

The Stones are also cultural giants in a way REM isn't and never will be.

And REM seem to have been determined not to be. Commercial decisions not to play stadiums and not stoke exaggerated tales of excess that would make Hunter Thompson blush?

It's kind of cool how longevity has worked for the Stones while they've been so consistently second rate. Starting not remotely in the same class as the Beatles but rebels. But by 1970 they weren't in the Beatles class of rebelliousness either. Songwriting improved but it needed to and not to Lennon-McCartney levels. Does anyone much rate them above Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Howlin Wolf, Hendrix or even Bert Jansch? Still they persisted. Their solo projects consistently sucked no matter what talent they brought in so the Stones continued and their cultural relevance grew.

Somehow I doubt anyone will care any more about Stones songs than Jagger or Richards solo songs 50 years hence. REM may fare no better. Could be wrong, only time will tell. Jagger's lips and tongue logo was another seemingly purely commercial decision that has greatly boosted their cultural relevance. In 1995 they were deemed by Microsoft to be second choice to REM on what we might assume to be a cultural basis.

REM played stadiums. I saw REM at a huge stadium. I am chuckling a bit at trying to weigh the Rolling Stones against Bert Jansch. There's not enough Pentangle in modern pop culture.

Really? Shows how far I am out of it. That must have been Ghastly. Back in '95 or so they seemed to play smaller capacity venues than sports stadiums (mostly with roofs?) The talk was that this was deliberate. I found it believable.

"Angie" seems more folk influenced than blues, for mine. Compare it to whatever you think is a good example of its genre and I'm sure you get the point. It's fine. Is it great?

Anyway The Stones remain an inspiring example to us all of sticking at it.

1995. World Music Center (capacity: 28,000), Radiohead opening, Patti Smith guest appearance. :)

https://archive.org/details/REM_1995-09-24

The Stones were giants to the Boomers, sure, but I'm pretty old Gen-Xer myself at 54 and I hardly know them -- I mostly know them because of stories of Mick Jagger being a jerk. And I suspect younger people like Millennials and Zoomers care even less about them. To my generation REM and U2 were the big bands (and I'm sure younger people probably care as little about those bands as I do the Stones).

If REM and U2 are your big bands, we're in the same generation, and my high school classmates today are sending pictures from Rolling Stones concerts they're going to on Insta. I'm not saying I like the Rolling Stones more (though: I probably like them more than U2).

I listen to Murmur like every other week. I listen to a Rolling Stones album every other decade. I listen to The Stone Roses more than the Stones. I'm not advocating for Mick Jagger, I'm just saying, he's more relevant to the culture than Michael Stipe.

Other than comparing the sales records of two bands, concert attendance, or other numerical measures, it's hard to imagine your comment makes any sense. The Stones and REM weren't contemporaries.

This to me is like saying "other than comparing all the available evidence about a rock music act, it's hard to imagine your comment makes any sense".

Yep, once you do a Pizza Hut commercial you know there is no going back.

Stipe is close friends with Ian of Minor Threat, so you could say Stipe is familiar with the ethos of punk.

> Windows 95 was culturally pretty big.

When you didn't have to deal wirh it, yes. /s

> Bill Gates, wanted “It’s the end of the world” for his advertising blitz...he had to settle for the Rolling Stones “Start Me Up” instead

Whether the humor was intentional or not, both songs would have been great choices.

> I don’t know what the members of REM believe, probably not all the same thing. But whatever it is, maybe they do really believe it. That counts for something. Contrast Mick Jagger & Keith Richards.

Who were probably like "better say yes before they listen to the rest of the song!"

> Not since the Muzak corporation has there been an institution that soundtracks drugstores, supermarkets, and shopping malls more readily than R.E.M.

Wondering if other people agree with this? Because it doesn’t really match my experience at all. I wouldn’t say I’ve heard REM in stores often enough for them to be noteworthy in that regard, much less infamous.

I've definitely heard REM in grocery stores and stuff, but not considerably more than other rock bands. I think popular older rock music of almost any genre is kind of the go-to background music these days. People are nostalgic for the old tunes they grew up with, so 30-40 year olds shopping for milk kind of like it, or at least find it inoffensive. That's my sense for it anyway.

Heck, I remember once stopping in my tracks in a grocery aisle because I heard War Pigs by Black Sabbath playing over the sound system. No one else in the store seemed to be paying attention, though.

It's an incredibly jerk line to start the article with and completely untrue. I'm not saying that I've never heard an REM song in a store, but the idea that REM is somehow the soundtrack of capitalism seems entirely made up.

Your Nirvanas and Pavements and Radioheads—behemoth alt-rock bands that seem to be endlessly rediscovered by newer generations as a source of credibility—have kept their cultural capital, while R.E.M. remains marooned in Alternative Muzak-land.

The irony of this being published in The Yale Review is too much for me. If REM had stopped after Reckoning the way Television did after Adventure, the only way anyone would be able to talk about them would be in hushed reverential tones. The article scoffs at the notion of "selling out", but then tells a story of an esteemed band doing exactly that, and the inevitable outcome, of "Losing My Religion" playing in the background at every supermarket.

(For calibration purposes: Murmur is a top 5 album for me, and my top 5 REM albums would include Automatic).

All credibility is gone if you, in 2025, still have Murmur over Reckoning in your REM rankings.

Silence, Out Of Time-liker.

There is one song on that album that is problematic and that’s because it was played _too much by everyone_.

A single album ruining both Kate Pierson and KRS-One is a special accomplishment.

If all that album did was introduce a bunch of c&c music factory fans to the B52s and juice the sales of criminal minded it would be worth the price of hearing the Losing My Religion Muzak at the dentists office.

To me it sort of cemented the transition from the B52s of Planet Claire to the B52s of Love Shack. An album of D-grade REM songs with "Roam" playing behind them. Every song on the album would have been improved with Fred Schneider randomly interjecting. Especially "Losing My Religion". "That's me in the spotlight, baby!"

Also: the first REM album where you could really hear how bad Stipe's singing was, and not in that good "anyone can sing along to this and it will still sound like the Flaming Lips" Wayne Coyne way.

I really dislike that album.

I think it suffers from 2 very specific things, the brilliance of automatic and nevermind being released in the same year.

But it has 2 more important things in its favor. It turned me on to REM and the rest of popular music that year. The album holds up better than the hate it receives but in its own era it is an amazing bright spot.

Fine I'll stop messing with you about it.

A few minutes ago I picked up a dusty CD at random, after possibly multiple years of not listening to my CD collection. It was a REM album.

Then I open HN and I see this title. Serendipity

That's a "Coincidence". "Serendipity" refers to learning new unexpected knowledge while searching for some other knowledge. pushes glasses back up nose, makes nerd snort

If we’re going down that route, here’s an actual definition:

serendipity /ˌsɛrənˈdɪpɪti/ noun

- the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.

Seems like parent’s use is Ok.

In the modern sense. I'm a bit of a stickler. Kinda like how many feel about Morrisette's use of Irony.

TIL it comes from:

"1754: coined by Horace Walpole, suggested by The Three Princes of Serendip, the title of a fairy tale in which the heroes ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’."

Btw thanks for picking nits. New things can be learned no matter what

Similar here, long time R.E.M. listener/collector who had just listened to some last week, then surprisingly heard Stand played quietly at a bar on the weekend (even misidentified it as Nirvana at first, it was really barely hearable, the kind of happy bar where people are louder than music, not the reverse) and now "Then I open HN and I see this title".

I do start to wonder if there's some sub-threshold attention wave going on.

You're one of the main characters. Make good choices, us NPCs are counting on you! :)

As an elder millennial, I like early REM. I can place them on the alt indie history timeline. Yet unlike sonic youth or pavement or my bloody valentine, REM made it well into top 40 territory. I don’t have a strong attachment to the band. Compared to Radiohead or Interpol who seem to be engrained in my core memories. I don’t know if college aged people today have major exposure to music from 98-2008.

I will never understand Pavement. I was born without the nervous system structure required to understand Pavement.

i just remember MTv being seismic in 91. Smells Like Teen Spirit, that video of Even Flow live in Seattle, Magic has HIV and Kurt Loder is wearing a CON-DOM shirt before spinning Ain't Too Proud to Beg where Left Eye is wearing a condom in her right eye. 120 Minutes was the best, Matt Pinfield got me through some crappy papers about Ethan Frome and any one of those books that uses red on the body as a symbol of whatever

there was that day the video for Losing My Religion came out and it seemed like a harbinger of both the beginning and end of the dual pillars of 80s college / grunge. bless you Murmur, bless you Meat Puppets, bless you MTv. touch me i'm sick, everybody, i wanna dip my balls in it!

"My father gave me Monster a week after buying it, calling it “the most pretentious piece of shit I’ve ever heard.” This is funny because the whole point of Monster was a shot at unpretentiousness." [1]

I never got into REM, I preferred The Fall, The The, The Smiths, Pixies, Pavement.

[1] https://www.treblezine.com/out-of-time-r-e-m-s-generation-ga...

We can be frenz.

"Monster" is the only R.E.M. album from the Bill Berry era that I never listen to. Not quite sure why, but I gave it the requisite three listens when it came out and shelved it. Nearly wrote R.E.M. off at that point, but "New Adventures in Hi-Fi" brought me back. Was disappointed when Berry left and they didn't break up then as they had always said they would. (They'd said many times that if anybody left, it wouldn't be R.E.M. any more and they wouldn't carry on... but then they did anyway.)

Got to see them live on the Green tour in 1989. Still one of my top-five concerts of all time, and I've been to more shows than I can count since.

It has an extremely grating guitar tone. Love REM. Love all kinds noisy guitar rock, that album just hurts my ears. [edit] Also saw them on the Green tour Oct ‘89 :-))

This is a really good synopsys, not too fawning, not too critical. REM was an early college band that was sincere and handled pop fame with tact and restraint (counterpoint: U2, of the same era). They sort of did exactly what a "normal" band should do: write music, find fans, expose people to a new style of music, become very popular, don't try to push it past the cultural shifts, and gracefully exit without any scandal are smarminess. Who does that anymore, or even gets the chance? I think the only bummer is that they influenced so many alt musicians that their style is in everything non-pop these days.

Of course, I'm pretty biased, though: I was a senior in highschool when the day after REM played my city half my graduating class was wearing the concert shirt.

Were they all that restrained? I'm thinking about Stipe's cringe-y activism, and the starfucker galaxy of Stipe, Courtney Love, and Billy Corgan; even the idea of "meeting [grunge] on its own turf" is a reframing of the band not as an authentic artistic endeavor but as a pop culture trend artifact.

How much influence did REM have? What's a well-regarded indie musician you'd say was prompted largely by REM itself, rather than Patti Smith and Big Star?

>> cringe-y activism,

That subjectivity depends on what side of the political spectrum you fall.

>> starfucker galaxy

eyeroll

Love/Corgan are still trying to ride their 15-mintues TO THIS DAY. Love is like a venereal disease, she just keeps coming back. And Corgan groomed some teen-aged fan to be his bride and is currently performing 7 hour meditation synthloop pieces to select audiences.

Where's Stipe? Off being a normal human.

>> meeting [grunge] on its own turf"

Uh, when did REM say this?

I'm on REM's side of the political spectrum, and have always found Stipe's activism to be performative; in fact, a lot like Morrissey's activism, except Morrissey put his money where his mouth was (more's the pity for all the rest of us). I think of REM and immediately flash back to a high school friend that had "DIRECT" "PEACE" "NOW" "REM" buttons on her coat, and presumably no idea what those words actually meant (except for the REM bit) --- much like Stipe himself.

I'm not saying Stipe is morally equivalent to Corgan (though: be careful how much research you do here). I'm saying that, in the grim span from "Out of Time" to "Monster", Stipe was approximately as authentic as Corgan, and was a social scenester in the same way. It alarms me to realize that Corgan was a more formally interesting songwriter in that period than Stipe was.

REM didn't say they met grunge on its own turf; the article did. But I vividly remember the launch of Monster, and it was in fact an answer to grunge. The author of this piece is not making that up.

I think REM's first couple records (and, probably, Automatic) are basically unimpeachable. I'm not cynically dunking on REM.

> I'm on REM's side of the political spectrum, and have always found Stipe's activism to be performative

I don't think it's performative, but it was definitely a later-stage add-on. The blame for that (positive or negative) falls squarely on Natalie Merchant.

>> It alarms me to realize that Corgan was a more formally interesting songwriter in that period than Stipe was.

"formally interesting". I'm a native English speaker and composer and don't understand your phrasing.

>> I'm on REM's side of the political spectrum, and have always found Stipe's activism to be performative;

I disagree, but it entirely rests on what one person's definition of "cringey" is. I think your awkward attempts at sounding intellectual are alarmingly cringey and less formally interesting.

Something is formally interesting when it varies a basic aspect of the genre. A song that was one long verse with no chorus would be formally interesting. Throbbing Gristle was formally innovative in exploring noise rock and creating "industrial" music. Kid A was a formally interesting British rock album (to the point of alienating fans). The Flaming Lips made an album delivered on 4 CDs that you'd queue up and play simultaneously, so that the minute differences in timing would ensure no listen was precisely the same. Formally interesting (also: not very good).

By 1993, neither REM nor (obviously) The Smashing Pumpkins were formally interesting bands. But REM would go on to make the same album, just with fewer and fewer hooks. Adore, on the other hand, was the Pumpkins Kid A, a transition from "Shopping Mall Shoegazer" to gothy electronic (it gives me no pleasure to report that the album predates Kid A by 2 years, but may have been expedited by Corgan's hair loss). It wasn't, like, a great album, because the Pumpkins are not Radiohead. But it was a departure, both from their previous catalog and from what was playing on the radio at the time.

(I reassure myself by telling myself that both Radiohead and the Smashing Pumpkins stole this musical shift from Bjork).

An aside: I think you will in the future find that dunks work better when you don't precede them by saying out loud "I don't know what the words in this dunk mean".

I think you're underestimating the influence of R.E.M. on their peers and those that follow. The first 3 that come to mind:

Nirvana - Cobain famously said "If I could write just a couple of songs as good as what they’ve written".

The National - Toured with, worked with, still bring Michael Stipe onstage every once in a while.

Radiohead - Thom Yorke: "I’ve ripped them off left, right and centre for years and years and years and years."

I concede Radiohead (though, of course, not Nirvana). First time I saw Radiohead was at an REM show (Patti Smith made a surprise appearance). I'd still go to bat for the argument that REM's influences are more influential than REM itself is.

Some other bands that list them as an influence are Pavement, Pearl Jam, Live, Collective Soul, Alice in Chains, Better Than Ezra, Liz Phair, The Decemberists, Wilco.

You hear Pearl Jam in that list the way you hear Nirvana, but I think that has more to do with the chronology and with REM's unofficial role as the bellwether/popularizer of alt radio (which I think is overblown) than any actual artistic influence. Whatever Liz Phair wants to say about Exile, her real influences (besides the Stones) are simply REM's influences.

I concede The Decemberists. Basically a band that blended the Athens Elephant 6 sound with 80s college rock. Sure: the Decemberists were more influenced by REM than by Patti Smith or the Velvets or Television.

Wilco is a weird one. I have a suspicion that Wilco, or at least Jay Bennett-era Wilco, is more influenced by mainstream early-90s alt rock than anybody is comfortable admitting. Heavy Metal Band is basically 1979 off Mellon Collie, which: what Chicago band is going to admit that influence?

Collective Soul, Better Than Ezra, Live: these are bands that kind of prove my point. The lead guy from Live once wrote Stipe a letter asking for advice on how to become a rock star.

> Wilco is a weird one.

Tweedy is from the Illinois side of metro St Louis and was touring colleges in southern IL, MO, KY, GA, etc as a member of Uncle Tupelo when he met and became friends with Buck. They collaborated on some projects, and Buck even produced an Uncle Tupelo album.

It’s probably better to think of it as “Tweedy influenced by REM” rather than “Wilco influenced by REM”.

I'm an unabashed Tupelo fan and I don't get as much alt-rock in No Depression or Anodyne (another top 5 album for me) as I do in Summerteeth and, especially, YHF.

But then Jay Bennett leaves and they're a krautrock band.

Wilco is almost totally based off of pub and roots rock https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAunCCRtPjM

Is being "your favorite band's favorite band" not the most insanely high praise though? I can't think of anything cooler.

Wait what does that even mean, "REM's influences are more influential than REM itself is"?

That Patti Smith and Big Star are more influential to bands today than REM.

Can’t comment on the Microsoft comment below since it’s dead, but… I wonder if there’s parallels to be drawn…

Gates and Allen went from Harvard to being founders in Albuquerque in ‘75 to Seattle ‘79 and becoming a corporate behemoth. Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe went from the University of Georgia in ‘80, bootstrapping their first record then signing with IRS records in ‘82, to being a corporate behemoth under Warner in ‘88. And if their first ~$10M Warner deal was a seed round, their next $80M deal was an exit.

Sounds like 'spurious correlations', a la Tyler Vigen [https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations] - compare to the cost of butter or the number of pirates in Maine, et al.

Anyway there's going to be co-causation: did Gen-X college-grad hipsters fuel the rise of alt-rock, or did the boom in alt-rock bands conform to the tastes of Gen-X college-grad hipsters and their increasing wealth (via the boomm in tech companies), and how much of that was mere social signalling about trying to be cool, vs musical tastes and intentional curation?

Where did you get the idea that Microsoft caused REM? All I said was they followed similar trajectories.

You think the radio, tv, live concert and record industry made billions selling a product people were only pretending to like?

There’s a lot to be explored in the social currents of the 80s-90s and the business of the music industry but you’re not going to get there from that angle.

Noone suggested Microsoft caused REM. I agreed with you that their separate rises happened to have similar trajectories, your observation was interesting, and I suggested there's not much to it beyond a loose correlation.

> But if it once was (or still is) alternative, one might then ask: Alternative to what?

One might ask that, but not if one were very smart. "Alternative" was the dumping ground for anything not playing on the weekly top-40, rap, country, or oldies channels. It's a useless genre

On any given day you could turn the radio to the "alternative" channel and have almost no expectation at all as to what kind of music you'd hear. In that sense REM is perfect for the genre, because their sound changed so much from album to album.

These are all alternative songs, all of which played on the alternative radio stations alongside REM, but good luck finding any kind of common thread beyond "there's usually a guitar involved":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IqH3uliwJY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JkIs37a2JE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt5EHAqhR1c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAdLskQtWo8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PDlGUdDF8Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPjPb3nNprg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBFXFzqIjHM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GCrzjVdmSg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzUnqr1t7yI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m39DWVFK-Bw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDK-wsdEhNE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ejga4kJUts

For those who don't want to watch:

1. Cherry Poppin' Daddies - "Zoot Suit Riot"

2. Jamiroquai - Virtual Insanity

3. Ben Folds Five - Brick

4. Tangerine Speedo - Caviar? I don't know, never heard this band.

5. Tori Amos - Winter

6. Ween - Push Th' Little Daisies

7. NIN - Mr. Self Destruct

8. The Presidents of the United States of America - Peaches

9. Jane's Addiction - Been Caught Stealing

10. 10,000 Maniacs - What's the Matter Here?

11. Pearl Jam - Better Man

12. The Cranberries - Zombie

1. Ska

2. Wikipedia says acid funk/jazz

3. Alternative

4. ?

5. Piano light rock

6. Alternative ish, kind of phish-ish?

7. Industrial

8. Alternative rock

9. Alternative rock

10. Alternative rock

11. Grunge

12. Grunge

I don't know what "Tangerine Speedo" is, but that aside, but all of these are alt acts. I have a weird thing about mid-90s alt rock radio (I very good memories with that soundtrack), and a bunch of playlists pulled from actual alt radio playlists, and all these acts were prominent. "Grunge" is a pure subset of alt; mainstream ska (C.P.D.'s one ill-advised high-rotation song was swing, not ska) and industrial were both offshoots of alt.

OMG they nearly played one show and then broke up. I’m not surprised you’re not cool enough to have heard of them. I heard of them before they formed. They were going to write a song but decided it was too commercial so they decided to never actually form a band to avoid selling out. You sound like a casual music listener.

So it's music that 89x played in Windsor/ Detroit in the nineties.

As Joshua Ray Walker might ask, “What even is this?” The first few links are from a decade and a half after REM and others started making lovely music that we called “college” at the time before it got lumped into alternative. Genre names tend to be decided by publishers, not fans, thus Billboard’s slow move to “R&B” once they realized “race records” was a little too on the nose. Any genre not deemed “pop(ular)” by publishers tended to be for a certain “special interest”, country, soul, race, college. There is power in having a name for things and knowing there are others out there like you, especially in the days when that statement only came from distant FM bands.

I always thought of alternative radio/music happening due to college radio becoming popular. College radio was always much more eclectic and avoided main stream music. At least it seemed to follow that path where I grew up as the alternative radio stations popping up all seemed to lift their playlists from the local college station's most popular and pop-oriented music.

Fair question. I kind of agree. The term "alternative" is more about what it isn't rather than what it is. During the early 90's that meant, not traditional rock and roll, not pop, not R&B. So not Van Halen, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, not Michael Jackson, Madonna, Celine Dion, TLC, etc.

Ah, these were my college years. IIRC the charts were very heavy on hiphop and country at the time (as they still are) so alternative was pretty much where all the other genres went. Not so much the songs that didn't make the charts, as entire genres that were niche.

"It's a useless genre"

Today, sure. It wasn't always. Alternative in the 80s was pretty much "rock, but too weird and smart to be played on the AOR/classic rock stations, and not on a major label". That might sound like "dumping ground" as you described, but it wasn't really -- it was a fairly coherent genre for a while, until everything started being called alternative if it wasn't pop or mainstream hard rock, etc.

Classic rock stations would play Guns 'n Roses, Def Leppard, but not R.E.M. or Concrete Blonde, and certainly not Rollins Band, for instance. There were no alternative rock stations, at least in/around St. Louis, excepting the college station (KDHX, 88.1).

Legit alternative: R.E.M., Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians, The Replacements, The Smithereens, The Smiths, B52s, XTC, Concrete Blonde, Echo & The Bunnymen, Pixies, Dinosaur Jr, plenty of others. In the late 80s and early 90s, after R.E.M. and others had commercial breakouts, the genre was muddied beyond recognition. Especially with the advent of grunge and more accessible industrial music like NIN.

I mean, Ben Folds Five and Jamiroquai are hard to stick up for, but they're "legit" in the sense that neither would have fit on AOR radio or on the AOR charts.

BFF's first album was in 1993, and Jamiroquai was formed in 1992, I think. Both of those were well after the term was muddied beyond recognition. I'm skeptical of the claim that Jamiroquai was being tagged "alternative", same with Cherry Poppin' Daddies (also 90s, IIRC).

Note that by the mid-90s, if not sooner, a lot of 80s alt-rock was seeping into AOR / classic rock / hard rock playlists. (Source: was a DJ on a classic rock station from 1995 through 1998. Played R.E.M., Pearl Jam, bunch of other alternative/grunge stuff alongside 60s/70s/80s classic rock. And a little bit that wasn't technically on the approved list since I was usually working midnight to 6 a.m., but that's another story.)

Right, I'm just saying that "alternative" never had a pure meaning to begin with. Punk had a DIY ethos. Art rock had formal experimentation and also lyrics that don't mean anything. Hard rock had codpieces. Alternative was just a relabeling of a "misc" category, and genre rock was so stultified by the time the label happened that anything good was naturally going to sprout inside that "misc".

> There were no alternative rock stations, at least in/around St. Louis, excepting the college station (KDHX, 88.1).

In the Seattle area around that time "alternative" was just whatever CKMU (also a college station) happened to be playing.

"Alternative to what, being popular?"

Yes. Exactly the point.

Pixies, Dino Jr., and the Replacements have very little in common with the rest of the ‘legit alternative’ bands you listed. For one, they’re actually worth listening to, and I’d say they’re indie rock instead of alternative rock.

In the 80s, college stations were all I listened to other than WXRT when I was visiting friends in Chicago.

"Alternative" makes more sense when you remember:

* The name "Alternative" is a rebrand of "Modern Rock" (modern wasn't superseded by alternative; it became known as alternative).

* "Alternative" is an alternative to AOR and hard rock/metal. You can dunk on it by pointing to bands like Alice in Chains, which is basically a drop-tuned Motley Crue with harder-to-understand lyrics, but really the whole point of it as a "genre" was as a catch-all for acts that sounded neither like Guns n' Roses nor Fleetwood Mac.

Cherry Poppin' Daddies is unforgivable, though. I'll give you that. But without a playlist like yours, you never could have gotten the BNL bit on Community:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfdTnpV03p8

I picked up a few years worth of Rolling Stone from the late 1970s which chronicle dissatisfaction with Rock as a genre. It started out with classically trained musicians who went into directions such as progressive rock and arena rock that eventually drifted away from critics and audiences.

You got a new generation of people who learned to strum the guitar because they liked rock music and they gave us punk and other simplifications of rock. Punk had no commercial potential and thus gave rise to post-punk and new wave which, after a few years that everybody (even Barry Manilow) had to make disco records if they wanted to get play, had a backlash. First synths became a "new sound" (even Neil Young!) but soon they became mandatory as they were the basis for "music word processors" and once the old musicians switched to them people quit caring about their new albums.

Alternative came out in the 1980s as a reaction to that whole mess.

I agree- the label was always about marketing more than anything. If you were under 30 and your songs were in any way vaguely different from the status quo of pop and rock, you too could be "alternative".

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