Alternative Music is Becoming Mainstream

PHOTO CREDIT: ITUNES MEDIA

BY GABI FICKINGER

When you go on to iTunes radio to listen to your favorite genre of music, the first station suggestion is “iTunes Weekly Top 50 – Alternative”. You’d think that the most listened to genre would be pop, a.k.a. popular music, but the exact opposite is true: alternative music has become mainstream.

The term “pop song,” is first recorded as being used in 1926 in the sense of a piece of music “having popular appeal”. It wasn’t a genre so much as it was a compilation of whatever people liked to listen to at the time. Over time, however, it took on a new meaning. “Pop” became synonymous with up-beat auto-tuned music, which caused it to become its own genre.

Alternative music is the polar opposite of “pop”. The genre was coined by artists who didn’t fit the new criteria for “pop” music and were an alternate style of music all together. Bands such as Nirvana took the lead in this new type of music, associating words such as “grunge” and “punk”. The genre grew in popularity over time, but was still in the background when compared to the big “pop” artists of the time.

As the alternative genre grew, more bands and artists popped up with large fan-bases. Blink-182, Green Day, and Fall Out Boy are a few who made the genre increasingly popular amongst young people by adding a small element of “pop” to their sound, while still maintaining the core “punk” aspects of the alternative genre. More and more bands came into the picture, continuing to warp the definition of alternative music.

Alternative music producers began to urge their clients to write for the charts. “Pop punk” was the defining drive behind alternative bands making the “pop” charts. Since then, very “poppy” bands have arisen who have labeled themselves as alternative artists. With Fall Out Boy and the older alternative bands still kicking, the genre became an umbrella. Now the alternative charts hold more weight than “pop” charts and bands like 5 Seconds Of Summer and Imagine Dragons appear on the same list as Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco. Honestly, would you expect “She Looks So Perfect” and “My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light ‘Em Up)” to be next to each other on the alternative charts?

Alternative music today is so far from what it originally was- an alternate genre to “pop”. When alternative music is more popular that “pop” music, it’s no longer alternative by definition. However, the most popular music of a time period changes as the culture of society does, and the word alternative has taken on a new meaning.