![]() “Everything in its Right Place” by RadioheadĪt this point in the game, it had become clear that early 2000s alternative songs were simply the ones the cool kids listened to. Alternative didn’t simply mean, “sounds kinda like Nirvana.” It had spread to all kinds of subgenres and could be applied to pop-punk acts like Blink 182 as easily as it could be applied to folk/Americana heroes, Wilco. Early 2000s alternative songsīy the early 2000s, the term “alternative” was becoming more and more meaningless, but that’s really just because more and more or the bands we had considered to be alternative were now mainstream, and the alternative label was being applied more broadly. Some were big and glossy, while others were stripped down and lo-fi.Įither way, this is your guide to understanding what alternative music is, and the essential songs for your alternative playlist. So, instead of thinking of something interesting, we settled on “alternative.” What was it an alternative to? We were never really sure.īy the 2000s, alternative had gone mainstream and 2000s alternative songs were all over the map. This genre was simply too varied to settle on a single word. Just calling them “rock” didn’t acknowledge that they sounded a little different, but there just didn’t seem to be another appropriate word. The thing was, though, these new bands were becoming awfully popular with mainstream audiences, and labels and radio stations were having trouble coming up with a category for them. New Wave was alternative (for a while at least), but the term “alternative” didn’t really become part of the cultural lexicon until the 1990s when you had a strange collision of commercial rock music (think: Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, U2, etc.) and bands that were more rough around the edges (think: Nirvana, The Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, Radiohead, etc.) The true origins of alternative music go back to the 1970s and come from a subculture of musicians who produced music despite flying below the radar of the mainstream music industry. ![]() Ah, the 2000s… a time when we had finally figured out a definition of what “alternative music” was, just in time for that definition to lose all meaning.
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