This document provides an overview of alternative rock music, discussing its origins and key developments. It establishes that alternative rock emerged from independent labels and scenes in opposition to corporate rock in the 1970s. Notable early alternative bands included The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, and The Ramones. In the 1980s, bands like R.E.M., The Replacements, U2, and The Smiths signed to independent labels and helped establish alternative rock as a genre through their unique sounds and anti-commercial attitudes.

1. Popular Music Studies:
Alternative Rock
Week 1
Establishing the Genre

2. What is ‘Alternative Rock’?
• Often conflated with ‘independent rock’
• A marketing label?
• Independent or minor labels
• Alternative in attitude…
• A DIY ethos, anti-commercial outlook
• Musical and production trends can be
observed

3. Four Stages of Rock Life and Death
Cycle
1. Native
A small scene, based on art and community
2. Sovereign
The breakthrough, belonging to all
3. Recessionary
Retreating from mainstream, fracturing
4. Classical
Forming into a canon

4. A Brief Timeline
• 1950s: Rock‘n’roll – Bill Haley, Elvis
• 1960s: ‘British Invasion’
• Folk, Blues, Psychedlia…
• 1970s: Progressive Rock
• By 1975: ‘corporate rock’, ‘AOR rock’

5. Sex Pistols

8. Velvet Underground
• The Velvet Underground and Nico (1966)

9. • The Stooges
• The Ramones
• MC5

10. • The Buzzcocks
• The Clash
• The Jam

11. • Punk…
• US - New Wave, Hardcore, ‘College Rock’
• UK - Mod-rock, Goth-rock

12. Siouxsie and the Banshees

13. Bauhaus
• “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” – the first goth record?

14. The Cure
• Early records fit the ‘goth rock’ aesthetic

15. Joy Division
• 1976-80
• Signed to Factory Records
• Two albums:
• Unknown Pleasures (1978)
• Closer (1980)

16. • Musical diversity  Multi-national Control
• Debunked by Simon Frith
• Emergence of independent labels
• ‘Majors’ and ‘minors’
• Subordinate market, or test pool

17. Distribution and Licensing
• …
• …
• …
• …

18. “There’s only two things that happen with
independent labels – you either get bought
out or you die.”
- Alan McGee

19. UK Indie chart
• Indie record store sales not registered in main
charts, so…
• Started in 1980
• Based on method of distribution

20. Authenticity
• Something which can be compromised by
either commercial concerns or technological
concerns.
• The ‘authenticity of the old’?
• Romantic vs. Modernist ideas
• An issue of diametric opposites:

21. Authenticity
• Art v Commerce
• Rock v Pop
• Minor v Major
• Honest v Dishonest
• Credible v False/Manufactured

22. Authenticity
• The idea of “selling out”
• Bottom-up, rather than top-down, control of
musical output
• Bands should not want commercial success

23. The Replacements
• Started as hardcore punk
• Signed to Twin/Tone in 1980
• Stink (1982)
• Soon moved towards a slower, less aggressive
sound which can be identified as the first
strand of ‘alternative rock’
• Tim (Sire, 1985)

24. R.E.M.
• Athens, Georgia
• Signed to I.R.S. in 1980
• Murmur (1983)

25. R.E.M.

26. U2
• Formed in 1976, as a
post-punk band
• Signed to Island in 1980
• Boy (1980)

27. U2
• The Joshua Tree (Island,
1987)
• Influenced by US blues
and folk
• Island couldn’t pay their
royalties
• Zooropa (Island, 1993)

28. The Smiths
• 1982
• Signed to Rough Trade
• Essential UK independent (or alternative)
band of the 1980s

29. The Smiths

30. The Smiths
• Commercial success within the UK
• 1987, broke up as they signed a major-label
deal