Music critic David Lindquist of the Indianapolis Star describes what happened at a radio-station festival outside that city this weekend:

Thankfully, at the end of a daylong parade of dumbed-down macho swagger and numbing bass riffs, redemption arrived with one of the bands that made the first half of the 1990s a golden era for inventive rock.

Consider similar comments by music blogger Matthew Perpetua:

The most basic appeal of the Smashing Pumpkins comes from the way Billy Corgan strips out the dull machismo from hard rock and replaces it with sensitive androgyny and ecstatic spirituality. Like a majority of the rock stars of the early ’90s, Corgan rebelled against the dude-ness of his own genre, but thanks to the unavoidable femininity of his voice and his soft baby face, he was able to depart from tradition more dramatically than the more obviously masculine likes of Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder.

I find in these remarks the essence of what was “alternative” about “alternative rock”; it’s precisely on point to remember that it supplanted atop the charts (i.e., it was an alternative to) what its supporters often derided as “cock rock”.

Has the label “alternative rock” truly lost that meaning over the last 10 years?  Jill says it has, but I am not so sure. Certainly, as with any phrase that becomes generally associated with something good and successful, attempts have been made to use it where it might not be applicable. However, I more often hear the term “modern rock” being applied to today’s…I don’t think I can call them “today’s cock-rockers”, because they always strike me as too pathetic. (Shall I propose “bum rock” as a term? That would evoke not only their lousy long-term career prospects as the beneficiaries of “short money”, but also it would suggest the erogenous zone to which the purveyors of hopeless misogyny may ultimately need to direct their attentions.) I don’t recall seeing any serious person using the phrase “alternative rock” to describe the work of Hinder or Buckcherry.

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