Alternative Rock

The other day, I was thinking about my delight that Foster the People's song "Pumped Up Kicks" managed to top the charts last year, a feat rarely accomplished by alternative rock songs after Devo fell out of vogue. Considering that was because MTV was playing their music videos should tell you how long ago that was.  This is also excluding the boom of alternative rock in 2004, considering most of those bands completely dropped off the radar soon afterwards or, at best, returned to their initial level of obscurity.


"Why is this?" I wondered. The most obvious answer, of course, is that it's a matter of Y thus X. The songs are alternative rock specifically because they fall outside the domain of what is generally considered popular. This may be why some bands, specifically The Black Keys, sell their music as "alternative" on iTunes despite clearly being good old-fashioned rock, in order to distance themselves from the more popular rock sub-genres and bands like The All-American Rejects and Green Day. For whatever reason, though, I've noticed the opposite: Join Us by They Might Be Giants, considered by some, namely myself, whose opinion on the matter is absolute and unquestionable, to be the cornerstones of modern alternative, was listed as "Rock" on iTunes.

Before continuing, I'd like to clear up my stance on an issue that is key here, and that's whether it should be called "Alternative Rock" and accepted as an offshoot of rock'n'roll, or if it should simply be treated as "Alternative" and treated as an entirely different entity. I believe it is not unreasonable to consider both of these correct; that is, there are "alternative rock" songs that are rock-based and "alternative" songs that are not thusly hinged. "I am the Walrus": alternative rock. "Revolution 9": Alternative. That sort of thing. (Though of course, that's a modern perspective, as both those songs were released as rock at the time.) When discussing alternative music, however, it is rarely necessary to make this distinction.

Something else I'd like to clear up: the difference between a "nerd" or a "geek" and a "hipster" is a razor-thin but important one. Nerds and geeks enjoy things, in this case music, that is weird and obscure. Hipsters enjoy things BECAUSE they are weird and obscure, and I personally will have no part of it.

If I may digress for a moment, the entire hipster attitude seems based on an unsustainable policy. If you only listen to things that are unknown, then you can't boast to anyone that "I knew them before they got big". If they do in fact get big, then you can't listen to them anymore. You must make carefully-placed bets to ensure that a band will remain unknown long enough to produce music you will claim to enjoy and establishing yourself as a fan while still eventually becoming popular enough that you can bitterly scorn them later.

Proceeding on with my point. I think one of the key reasons why alternative rock is so rarely entertained is that it is perhaps the hardest genre into which to break for new listeners. With pop or rock or jazz you can, to some degree, say, "Oh, you like Band A? You might like Band B, their sound is somewhat similar". Alternative does not have this option, as any alternative band worth their salt has a sound that is quite distinctive from any other. OK Go and Jonathan Coulton have both opened for They Might Be Giants, but compare the average They Might Be Giants song to the average OK Go song and you'll see they're quite dissimilar. "The average They Might Be Giants song" is already rather oxymoronic to begin. Compare "Climbing the Walls" to "In Fact" and it wouldn't be unreasonable to believe they'd been compared by two entirely different bands, though John Linnell's singing voice gives it away. Not counting childrens' albums, these were released on the successive The Else and Join Us. This means that just because someone likes "Float On" they will not necessarily like anything else by Modest Mouse, let alone anything by The Shins, Harlem Shakes, or Matt & Kim.

Another reason is that the world of alternative rock does not have the media coverage that other genres have. There are of course a number of reasons for this reason, but I'd like to focus on the demographics to which alternative music appeals. If you'll remember back to that dark period known as "when we were children", there was the pop star war between Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and the nearly-simultaneous Boy Band Battle. Each artist profited by turning fans against each other to ensure loyalty, even though they really did sound quite similar and in many cases (Backstreet Boys and N*Sync) shared a producer. In alternative music, someone who likes the sound of Fleet Foxes will not leave them for Mumford and Sons, they will simply buy music from both bands, in the cases where sounds do overlap. Thus you have people buying a large berth of music rather than a single song over and over, preventing most from entering the Billboard list, let alone topping it.

Another factor is because thirty-something nerds who spend all day practicing their instruments and sitting in front of a computer producing them are rarely quite as photogenic as whichever starlet is big this week.

Not that I'm bashing popular music in general or the pop genre. My policy is, if it sounds good, listen to it, regardless of how it was produced or how many other people have listened to it. Yes, I may harp on about how much I hate Justin Bieber or Ke$ha, but only because other people know about what I'm talking. I hate Dashboard Confessional just as much but it's much less satisfying to complain about them to a vacant audience. And guilty pleasure they may be, I do have The Killers on my iPod.


Still, as long as a decent number of bands continues to release a decent number of decent songs, I'll be happy.  Signing off.