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"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.

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.

"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 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.

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 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.

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.

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".

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