What do Lollaapalooza 93, the death of Top 40 radio and the sort of dreck touted by MTV as "alternative" have in common? I'm not sure, but I think it has something to do with my aversion to the word "alternative.
As I see it, in the niche market era we live in, radio is having a hard time trying to figure out what to sell to kids. In the past, there has always been a pop music that youth culture embraces. The descendant of that format in radio is Top 40, now predominantly listened to by working women age 25-40. The other radio formats are aimed at older audiences as well: classic rock for yuppies, urban contemporary for non-rap dance and soul, commercial country for adults concerned about their whiteness, etc. The youth forms have become rap (the best of which can't be played on the radio) and "alternative". Only contextualized like this does "alternative" even begin to make sense: music which is not from the last generation, Nashville or Whitney Houston. Within this structure, it's no wonder the Spin Doctors sound novel.
Lollapalooza, in the long run, is the major label's way of fitting "alternative" artists into a stardom model of pop music culture. Since "alternative" initially described a counter to pop forces, the music industry needed to find a way to fit these groups or artists into mass (i.e. popular) consciousness. While "cult" status works well as an imaging tool, they needed familiar outlets to validate grand-scale success. With some point of reference to a band as a headliner, or at least part of a festival bill of a major show, "cult" bands become the stars. In this way, Lollapalooza is a sort of legitimizing agent. A look at the amount of time MTV gives various Lollapalooza groups before and after the tour might help flesh this out. Like Lollapalooza, MTV is part of the circular logic of music marketing: an artist must be nationally recognized to be nationally recognized. To be successful through Lollapaloza is to be successful on MTV, in Coke commercials, etc.
In helping to steer this process, MTV has even managed to lose the one thing they had going for them- open format programming. Now the rap is in one chunk, the soul in another, the metal on Saturday nights, and the "alternative" rides into a couple of slots. The difference between most of what they are pushing as "alternative" and other rock is minimal.
There is no reason to suspect that these people whose job it is to sell music (or, rather, sell ads using music) are not going to stop using the word "alternative". This gives those of us who expect more from music than what the industry offers no choice but to stop using the word altogether. I propose that until the commercial usage of the word "alternative" includes some other genres, some other voices, that the rest of us come up with something else to call "indie rock,' "college rock" or whatever. Let's leave "alternative" to 4 Non Blondes and Spin Doctors.
by Bob Boster, station manager at WXYC-FM. Contact him c/o Stay Free!, P.O. Box 702, Chapel Hill, NC 27515. E-mail: jhuber@gibbs.oit.unc.edu