Classic Alternative?

Umm, what?

Here's a blurb about a recent format change

Here's an old story (4 1/2 years!) speculating on just such a move.

Can something "alternative" be "classic", or at some point does it cease to be "alternative"? I mean, Nirvana sounded like an alternative to hair metal in the early 90's, but today many popular acts show some of that Nirvana kind of influence, so is that sound really "alternative"?

BTW, alternative to what? Loud guitars and pounding drums?

We always said alternative to music.

Sounds like an oxymoron to me.

I also got a chuckle from the mention that a conservative talk station is going Spanish. That should give the commentators something to rail about during their last few days on the job.

"Alternative" became the name of a genre, as you know. "New Wave" is no longer new nor a wave. "Bossa Nova" means "new beat", and while the beat is still good, it's anything but new.

It's pretty short-term marketing sense when you name a genre based on the genre you're trying to replace. Nothing's new and/or different forever.

By the time the term "alternative" was being applied widely to music in the late 80s and early 90s, the music it was being applied to was most definitely not.

I think that it is part of geezerfication.

That's what I think.

I love those old New Wave songs. Pop Punk is good too. But sometimes nothing, and I mean nothing, can beat old school New Jack Swing.

Didn't you play on some of them?

Alternative ceased to describe a commercial relationship and began to describe a set of musical characteristics.

Most of the moderns have been dead for 50 years or more.

But the zaniest of them all is the simplest: Pop. If it simply meant, popular at the moment, fine--it could cover everything from Beyonce to (yikes) Avenged Sevenfold without a twinge of contradiction, but the term simply won't stop attaching itself to musical qualities.

Right. "Pop" is a ridiculous term. Though, I may add, most people know it when they hear it.

It's quite popular.