Word: mainstream
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...therein lies the controversy: alternative music is currently one of the most potent forces in the mainstream, which has triggered an identity crisis and rancorous debate among musicians and fans. If these rockers are stars now, fans ask, haven't they become everything we're against? Nothing better symbolizes the struggle for this musical genre's soul than the success of Pearl Jam, a band adored by followers but reviled by some fellow musicians as sellouts, poseurs or opportunists riding on the fame of their fellow Seattleites, Nirvana. Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain has said that bands like Pearl...
...company and released the huge hit Nevermind (more than 4 million copies sold) on the Geffen label, other major labels began an indie-band feeding frenzy. Bands that had been playing in taverns were being offered $300,000 contracts. Many of these groups were founded on the principle that mainstream music was bankrupt, which only made them more attractive to mainstream labels...
Members of the indie community are wary, almost paranoid, about the movement's being copied or co-opted by the mainstream. "One of the things that I think has really affected the underground negatively," says Bill Wyman, columnist for a Chicago alternative newspaper, "is this whole idea that this is 'our' little scene, it's for us, we play really loud music, we don't want fans, we don't want major record deals, it's uncool to be popular and to publicize your band...
...alternative bands keep flooding into the mainstream, then the word alternative may go out of style, just as "progressive rock" became passe in the 1980s. "Alternative" has become a marketing tool. "Five minutes ago, I saw an ad for Bud Dry: 'The alternative beer with the alternative taste,' " says Jim Pitt, who books musical acts for NBC's Late Night with Conan O'Brien. "Pretty soon you'll see an ad where they're moshing, 'Out of the mosh pit and into a Buick.' It's the cycle of American pop culture. Things get absorbed...
...creator Lorne Michaels, who has himself made a lucrative career out of counterculturalism, complained, ''It's very strange that a group that prides itself on representing the underground turns us down because we can't pay them enough.'' Punk, essentially a working-class British genre, never went fully mainstream in happy-face America. But since then the U.S. has become a significant bit more like Britain: the sense of tapped-out, no-hope job anxiety that has settled over this country helps postpunk bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam sell millions of records. And with megapopularity comes...