Word: rocks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...keeping with rock tradition, alternative is defiant. The twist is what it's rebelling against. What angers today's rockers and their fans is that life is so unjust, which they learned at a vulnerable age. Alternative rock is the sound of homes breaking. If you are in your teens or 20s, chances are your family has been through a divorce. Alternative music has become an emotional sound track, speaking directly to unresolved issues of abandonment and unfairness. "I tried hard to have a father/ But instead I had a dad," Nirvana's Cobain sings on In Utero...
...Vedder is a product of the thriving world of alternative rock, a musical genre that rejects the commercial values of mainstream pop. Alternative has no strict definition, but it has a feel. Its musicians reject show-biz glitz. They support progressive social causes. Many of them avoid dating groupies and models. Their music is usually guitar-driven, with experimental touches. While pop songs are often about love, alternative lyrics are usually about tougher feelings: despair, lust, confusion. Alternative rock is a reaction, especially among the twentysomething generation, to all the years of being subjected to Madonna's changing hair color...
...Alternative rock has been simmering for years, ready for this moment of boiling over. The Georgia-based band R.E.M. was an alternative pioneer in the mid-'80s that went mainstream years before Pearl Jam was even formed. What's new is that the record charts are now crowded with alternative bands ranging from the arty-rock quartet Smashing Pumpkins to the folk-tinged Soul Asylum. MTV's Alternative Nation program and the Lollapalooza road tour, which feature the new breed, have become the hippest venues going...
...terms of influence, alternative musicians borrow from the rough edges of rock's history. Out of the 1960s comes the spirit of social protest and artistic freedom. From the late 1970s come the primitive, do-it-yourself sensibility of punk and the slam-dancing and stage-diving mayhem that went with it. "We rip off everyone equally," says Shannon Hoon, lead singer of Blind Melon, which has sold more than 1 million copies of its first album this year. The trick is to sample riffs from somebody who's so long gone that the modern repetition of it sounds fresh...
Pearl Jam came together as a serendipitous offshoot of a Sub Pop band called Green River. Rock legend, passed along by the resentful, has it that bassist Jeff Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard split from that band because the lead vocalist wanted to stay true to the experimental spirit of alternative rock, while Ament and Gossard wanted to become big-time rock stars. The band they formed, Mother Love Bone, combined a heavy-metal sound with bouncy tunes. Just as the group seemed ready to break through in 1990, its lead singer died of a heroin overdose...