early-90s alt-rock vs. late-90s alt rock

there are no big bands anymore

I'm not even sure what contemporary bands are considered alt rock atm.

Go here.

Joanna Newsom, alt-rock auteur

I was thinking less indie bands (tho clearly those bands break through) and more like AltPress/Hot Topic style bands? Gaslight Anthem, Against Me! etc sound like they'd be at home on an alt rock format. And of course newish Green Day (MCR, Fallout Boy, Paramore) have had tremendous success there.

lol there's nowhere to break through to anymore. I doubt the guys in the National are millionaires, knowhutimean

I'm pretty sure Radiohead have done well for themselves, and Vampire Weekend will turn in a tidy profit.

I was thinking more like Modest Mouse, I guess. The National, or even LCD Soundsystem or whoever aren't even having big radio success even compared to the current musical climate -- let alone historical success.

I'm not even sure what contemporary bands are considered alt rock atm.

IMO think GAPDYX + Vampire Weekend, Death Cab For Cutie and LCD Soundsystem

like, the whole concept of alt-rock requires a thriving, well-funded "mainstream". which is gone.

Radiohead's been around since the early 90s tho. Be curious to see what Vampire Weekend's income is like, or how their album sales stack up to previous decades' indie darlings. Like, how many albums have they sold compared to a similarly charting band from 1996? A lot less, I'd bet.

(x-posts)

Early 90s 30+. Soundgarden rule.

some big modern rock radio bands right now that weren't already huge in the '90s: Muse, 30 Seconds To Mars, The Killers, Kings Of Leon

how the hell is U2 alt rock?!

black hole sun
won't you come
and wash away the horchata

Pretty sure Grizzly Bear + Animal Collective aren't getting a ton of radio play. Phoenix + Yeah Yeah Yeahs probably getting some, Death Cab (do they have new music?), Vampire Weekend for sure. Dirty Projectors not sure. How has LCD Soundsystem charted in the US? (Can only find UK chart info -- could mean US chart info is non-existent.)

fwiw, i can recall hearing Pheonix, YYYs, Death Cab, and VW on the fairly big alt station here

U2 are alt rock in the sense that the Cure are alt rock

only they have the added stadium rock/AOR-approved factor

Yeah, doesn't look like an LCD Soundsystem single has ever charted in the US.

it's kind of a different metric now; I don't think you can use radio play as the one true indicator, you kind of have to merge it with filtered-by-some-undetermined-algorithm data from internet sources

like my personal metric is "appears in my music video on-demand menu"

i think the joke on 'n american scum' is that they were 'big in the uk'

selling your music to commercials is a far more common option these days.

black hole sun
won't you come
and wash away the horchata

LOL IRL!!

Yeah, doesn't look like an LCD Soundsystem single has ever charted in the US.

― Mordy, Monday, May 17, 2010 10:45 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

genuine q: did pixies or husker du or sonic youth ever chart in the u.s.?

yeah these Pitchfork bands you guys are mentioning definitely are popular in many senses -- but again there are (less cool) youngish alt-rock bands that have ten times their sales and ten times their radio spins, if we're really talking about actual mainstream success stories.

I remember arguing on ILX when Strawberry Jam came out (or possible Person Pitch) about what the reach of that music was. At the time, no one I knew IRL had heard of AC or Panda Bear, despite the massive amount of hype they were getting in places like ILX, Stereogum, P4k, etc. I'm sure that's gotten better for AC since Merriweather, but I think for a lot of P4k hyped bands the popularity is still pretty localized and statistically insignificant.

I'd have to look them up, hm, but Sonic Youth 100% charted in the US.

yeah they had 5 minor modern rock hits from '88 to '94

Sonic Youth charted a bunch on Modern Rock format, as did the Pixies -- not sure about Husker Du.

The Pixies only charted on the modern rock chart, as far as I can tell.

Husker Du charted nowhere.

Sonic Youth had a bunch of albums in the Hot 100 and several modern rock chart singles.

AC hasn't charted at all afaik.

Pixies charted on the album chart. Doolittle is certified gold.

Sugar far outsold Husker Du.

genuine q: did pixies or husker du or sonic youth ever chart in the u.s.?

― all i wanna do is poll poll poll poll and zing and discuss mia (history mayne), Monday, May 17, 2010 5:48 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah they had 5 minor modern rock hits from '88 to '94

― couldn't think of anything to write instead of 'steendriver' (some dude), Monday, May 17, 2010 5:50 PM

VERY minor...in the Midwest about 1 in 75 people that you will run into randomly will have knowingly heard a song by any of the aforementioned bands.

lol I'd forgotten that "Brothersport" was so annoying, that may play into why AC hasn't charted

sonic youth is a vaguely familiar name...and they play here comes your man at baseball games & on mall P.A.s now, but i don't think anybody really recognizes it beyond the guitar riff...husker du, i don't even know....

xxxp MPP made it pretty onto the Billboard 100 didn't it?

pretty HIGH onto

oh yeah, 13

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_one_modern_rock_hits_of_2010

fwiw, the wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_alternative_rock include MPP in its list of 2009 Alternative Rock CDs (along with Green Day, the Dead Weather, Paramore, Pearl Jam, U2, Weezer, Wilco, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, other stuff).

Within the context of the modern rock charts, "100%" and "Kool Thing" were top 10 and therefore not minor. I still think those charts were just made up by some random dork though.

kool thing might not have been minor...but modern rock charts seemed kind of dodgy...i remember in '93 when i started to get into music, there was a two-hour block on the local top 40 station that was all modern rock, and that was all there was as far as modern rock goes...in 95 there was an actual local alt-rock station for about six months before it turned classic rock...they played stuff like the Deadlights, and the Nixons, and Loud Lucy, and Silverchair...by that time, Sonic Youth was already off the radar...

i think of "alternative" in the 90s as a marketing term, a brand of mainstream, rock-oriented pop offered to MTV-educated consumers who didn't want to think of themselves as unhip. though it carried a great deal of alt-cultural cache, "indie" (at the time) referred simply to label affiliation. since independent labels didn't then have much direct access to the radio listeners at whom alternative music was marketed, indie and alt were vastly different ballparks. alt was what commercially ambitious indie aspired to, and indie culture provided much of the cred that alt used to justify its distance from some other, ostensibly more mainstream-y mainstream. stereolab started the decade as an indie band, and like many others, ended it modestly successful alt rockers.

something like the alternative format still exists, though it seems to be playing for a much smaller slice of the pie these days. happy upside is that smaller labels and even label-less artists can compete with the majors - well, can at least get noticed and heard.

occasionally

In high school in the early nineties, I heard "progressive" and "post-modern" a lot.

postmodernism is characterized by an incredulity towards Animal Collective

Yeah, the thing is that until 1992 or so, there were only a handful of stations in the U.S. that called themselves "modern rock"/"alternative rock." It was a niche format and driven pretty much by whatever those stations, like KROQ, decided to play. So some of those early Modern Rock charts (beginning in 1988) look kind of weird and eclectic and British.

alt-rock absolutely was a marketing term, though any legitimate claim it had to making one seem not "unhip" was drastically reduced as the decade wore on...

early 90s alt-rock was basically mainstream radio-rock that fed the huge demand for 80s underground rock that had gone unnoticed by corporations and audiences alike until Smells Like Teen Spirit.

late 90s alt-rock was basically mainstream radio-rock with even more rough edges worn away in order to appeal to even more common denominators......I tend to think of tyhe late 90s stuff as crass and watered-down, but can see how the early-90s stuff can really grate...