Hopefully you're a little less heated now.
A lot of alternative bands sound alike. A ****load. So many that it's ironic that they call themselves alternative when they're doing the same **** as so many other people. These bands are the ones that can be easily connected, but due to the nature of what alternative music represents simply from its own language is that it is something that is different from the rest of what is popular. This makes alternative into a huge melting pot of miscellaneous genres. Some of these sound like a lot of the others and the others sound almost exactly like it. There are some genres in there that don't fit in with any of the genres, not even the other genres that are under the umbrella of alternative music with them.
Shoegaze, hardcore punk, britpop, experimental rock, new wave, trip hop, nu-metal, post grunge, funk rock, and so many other styles of music are under the alternative label. If you were to draw a chart to connect all of the artists by explicit similarities: angst, sustain, loudness, cheap tactic for people to think your basic rock band is somehow original, whatever, you would easily connect a lot of bands by one or more qualities beyond "misc."
Then there will be about 30 percent that do not have the common quality that unifies a majority of the bands. Twenty percent will have similarities to the artists in different ways from the central unifying quality. This would make them cousins in a way, but alternative is a very inclusive term, so they're also considered as such. Five percent of them will have neither the initial central quality nor the quality that connected the aforementioned 20 percent with the majority (let's say 70 percent), but instead will be connected through a third quality different from the other two. They'd be second cousins, but because alternative music means that it doesn't fall into other strictly defined genres, they are called alternative music as well even though they are two parts removed from the first similarity that you've established through this hypothetical web.
Then there's like .05 percent that is just chilling by itself with the rest of the genres, because it too does not fit into any established category, so it too is deemed alternative rock. It's beautiful, really. Everyone is invited to the alternative party. Nothing is anything and everything is nothing.
I see that your definition of alternative is pretty much based around the image built around it by the media (radio and labels, mainly) in the early 90s area. I'm basing it off of the meaning of the word, what it represents and the fact that I still have not seen a valid central quality for the word beyond the one that I keep bringing up in this post: miscellaneous. I've shown you examples of artists who do not have the ones you listed (Ween, etc.) and I have not seen any other qualities yet.
tl;dr come at me with a central quality for alternative music.
__________________
Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.
|