Alternative metal is characterized by heavy guitar riffs and experimental approaches to heavy music. The alternative music festival Lollapalooza helped the genre gain traction early on. Representatives: White Zombie, Therapy, Marylin Manson, Korn.

Origins of the genre

Funk rock band Mother’s Finest, from the album “Iron Age” (1981), is considered an early example of alternative metal. Originally, alternative metal was built on the appeal of alternative rock fans, as almost all alt metal bands throughout the 1980s had their roots in American alternative rock.

Bands of the alternative metal genre usually came out of genres such as hardcore punk (Corrosion of Conformity, Biohazard), noise rock (The Jesus Lizard, Helmet), grunge (Soundgarden, Alice in Chains) and industrial (Nine Inch Nails,Ministry). These bands were associated with incorporating traditional metal influences and various musical experiments on the genre.

A new wave of alternative metal roughly emerged from 1993-1994. This new sound is called nu metal (nu metal). This sound influenced Rage Against the Machine, White Zombie, Pantera, Tool, Nine Inch Nails and Faith No More. It combines the aggressive riffs of the band Korn, the acoustic ballads of Staind and the rap-rock of Limp Bizkit. Korn’s Neidermeyer’s Mind (1993) demo is considered the band’s first new metal album. In the late 1990s, nu metal bands started playing with a combination of some genres such as thrash metal, industrial, hip hop, grunge and hardcore punk. New bands such as Linkin Park drew from the same influences as Nine Inch Nails, Helmet, Faith No More, Korn, Rage Against the Machine and Deftones.

It has been established by many music critics that metal bands of the 1980s, in the 1990s were already releasing albums that have been described as alternative metal (including Metallica and Anthrax). It was also found that this musical genre was given a second wind thanks to bands such as HIM, Linkin Park and many others.

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So what is alternative music?

The most correct (in my personal opinion), given how popular alternative music is now, would be to say that it is a multi-genre music that does not fit into certain established canons and standards of traditional mainstream popular music. Often the term “alternative music” is also used to describe music that does not fit into any genre because it mixes several of them at once (because it is always easier to write “alternative” than to describe each one).

At the same time, it can also top the charts and win awards (often separately from traditional pop music), it can be very popular (like Foo Fighters, for example), or it can have a very limited circle of listeners and quite big problems with expanding the audience (you can find a lot of them on SoundCloud or Bandcamp). Therefore, to be fair, alternative music should be divided into mainstream and underground music.

Main characteristics of alternative music

• It itself and the way it is created often differ from what the industry defines as traditional;
• The main “requirements” are sincerity, creativity, and emotionality. Alternative music may not be very creative or innovative, but it should be emotional and creative;
• The opposite of the mainstream (this was the case in the beginning, but now it is not always relevant);
• Lack of a stable genre (for example, what is called “alternative rock” can be post-grunge, garage or dance rock, or a mixture of them;
• It does not always follow the established norms of song length and structure: alternative music is generally much freer (especially underground) than the radio-friendly format;
• The sound is multi-layered and has interesting melodic patterns, regardless of whether guitars form the basis or synthesizers.

The beauty and value of alternative music for the listener is not only in the sound. First of all, its value lies in the fact that it is always a challenge to something: certain established norms or shortcomings of society. It is always a kind of protest. It is not for nothing that the term “alternative music” was first applied to punk rock, which at that time could not be described by any of the existing terms. Songs about love are not uncommon in alternative music, but often the lyrics of these songs also raise various social issues.

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The formation of Alternative music was somewhat different in America and Britain. And although there were bands that became equally popular in both countries, such as R.E.M., there were many unique bands like Pearl Jam or Stone Roses that never managed to spread their success across the ocean. Moreover, the spread of entire subgenres was sometimes limited to one country (funk-metal, for example, was never popular in Britain).
Throughout most of the 80s, alternative was confined to small provincial clubs, makeshift recording studios, and campus radio stations. Only occasionally a single song would accidentally break through to MTV and TOP 40, or a single album would unexpectedly be praised by critics from influential mainstream magazines like Rolling Stone. Nevertheless, most alternative bands had little commercial appeal. Instead, rock bands slowly but surely gained fans by constantly touring and releasing low-budget albums every year. They were followed by more and more bands, and soon there was quite an impressive underground crowd, with their own schools (trends) emerging in different parts of the country.

Husker Du was associated with SST Records, the record company founded by Black Flag and Greg Ginn. SST was the most influential American independent studio of the 80s, publishing, in addition to Black Flag and Greg Ginn, such famous bands as Sonic Youth, Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Dinosaur Jr. and others. While it can’t be said that Husker Du paved the way for Sonic Youth – the New York band was already recording when Husker Du rose to prominence – Husker Du’s music prepared critics and audiences alike for Sonic Youth’s most determined creative experimentation. Sonic Youth were more artistic and, unlike R.E.M. and Husker Du, with a clear claim to artistic taste: their lyrics smacked of theatrical poetry, and their songs were usually lengthy, with shifting dissonant motifs.

Much of the alternative guitar pop of the late ’80s had roots in the clunky, unstructured music of the Feelies and the nervous, eccentric folk-rock of the Violent Femmes, who both debuted in the very early ’80s. Although the Feelies never sold many records, their jangling guitar riffs helped pave the way for the R.E.M. that followed. The Feelies’ twangy melodies and stingy lyrics had much in common with the songs Gordon Gano wrote for the Violent Femmes’ debut. These bands were the beginning of many unconventional guitar pop groups that were characterized by quirky and eccentric humor. Because they continued to actively record and tour when their quirky guitar pop became popular, the Feelies and Violent Femmes are considered not only the progenitors of the movement, but also an important part of the genre. However, in addition to them, there were a significant number of bands, ranging from the jocular duo They Might Be Giants to the jagged eclecticism of Camper Van Beethoven, that often made it onto the college charts. As for Britain, those bands that broke out of the mainstream and fell into this trend found more acceptance on American college radio stations than at home. Robyn Hitchcock, leader of the Soft Boys (who openly admitted to being heavily influenced by R.E.M.) was one of those British musicians who were warmly welcomed in the States. XTC’s intelligent, meticulously honed pop was also more likely to be spun in American colleges than in Britain.

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As the recognition of individual musicians among mass audiences grew, so did the interest of major record companies in this music. The complexity of the relationship between alternative styles and the music industry was exacerbated by the fact that in 1991 a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album was introduced, but the author of the winning work I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, Irish singer Sinead O’Connor, refused the award in protest against the industry’s “materialistic false values”.

The radical change was marked by the unexpected success of the grunge band Nirvana – in January 1992, their album “Nevermind” reached No. 1 on the U.S. chart, symbolically replacing the “King of Pop” Michael Jackson and his album “Dangerous,” which began a rapidly growing wave of popularity of alternative rock. Since then, many musicians have collaborated with major companies, and their recordings and videos have been broadcast on commercial radio and MTV music television. The traveling festival Lollapalooza, which first took place in 1991, greatly contributed to the prestige and spread of new styles, becoming an important event with wide resonance.

However, even at a time when many artists originally belonging to the alternative circuit were joining the mainstream of rock music, a number of musicians (Pavement, Fugazi, Mudhoney, Sleater-Kinney, Swans, etc.) still remained faithful to the originally non-commercial style – their creations were also increasingly referred to as indie rock in the United States. Over time, the term “indie rock” became an international synonym for “alternative rock”.
Famous alternative rock musicians of the time include Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Hole, Stone Temple Pilots, Smashing Pumpkins, Alanis Morissette, Skunk Anansie, Beck, PJ Harvey, Weezer, Bush, Garbage, Tori Amos, Nick Cave, Blur, Oasis, Suede and others.

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Initially, indie music was understood to mean any musical compositions that were not released by major record companies. At the same time, most independent bands and performers opposing the mainstream at that time played various types of post-punk (gothic rock, dark folk, neo-psychedelia, etc.) or alternative rock music (noise rock, shoegazing, etc.), which influenced the emerging image and content of indie music.

The origins of indie culture

In the broadest sense, indie is any independent music of various genres, including indie rock, indie pop, indie electronica, indie folk, and independent music labels.

Indie rock, which emerged in the 1980s, was a genre of alternative rock music that existed on the underground scene. During this period, the concept of indie rock was used as a synonym for alternative rock music in terms of content, but it allowed distinguishing musicians by geographical criteria: it was assumed that in the first case we are talking about performers from the UK, in the second – from the USA. However, in the 1990s, when American pop-punk and grunge musicians, as well as English Brit-pop musicians, became incredibly popular and entered the mainstream, the concept of indie rock began to denote representatives of the underground alternative rock music scene. In the 2000s, the development of the music industry and Internet technologies led to the fact that indie rock became a commercially successful trend, so the meaning of the term was rethought again.

Indie rock as a musical genre implies freedom for various creative experiments with emotional background, sound, and lyrical component, carried out in accordance with the vision of the performer, not the mass audience.

Today, indie rock includes many genres and performers associated with alternative culture and having some relation to rock. In addition to rock itself, indie music genres include indie pop, noise pop, dream pop, Brit pop, etc. All these styles are united by the fact that they were formed on the basis of indie rock.

As a rule, indie rock is soft and melodic music with a slight retro touch, without aggressive sound and sound effects such as distortion. Among the representatives of this musical genre are The Shins, Snow Patrol, and Coldplay. Thus, although indie music is derived from post-punk, it has a light and positive sound.

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