Falling Through the Cracks.

My love for the casualties of the Mainstreaming of the Alternative.

I posted a comment on a friend’s Facebook post of a great video from 1992 from the band House of Love. I think it’s worth a discussion.

When 1991 hit and Nirvana broke into the mainstream in a huge way, it did a lot of collateral things. Whether I would call it “damage” or not depends on perspective. The obvious thing that it did was to pretty much bury the 80s, especially the excesses of mainstream hair-pop-metal that had been so prevalent. At that time, we had moved away from the Motley Crue and Guns N Roses a little bit and the landscape had softened with a slew of slightly-less cartoonish bands like Slaughter, Winger, Warrant etc. The cresting wave of “Grunge” was a hard line in the sand between the hairsprayed dinosaurs and the unkempt flannel wearers. (Alice In Chains straddled the line as, to me, they were pretty much an 80s hair metal band that had emotional issues and got hooked on smack. The roots were still showing).

I personally did not miss any of those old bands of the 80s hair heyday, but there was another casualty in the music scene that I did miss.

Prior to the mainstreaming of what the media/industry called “alternative”, it wasn’t just a buzzword. It was an apt adjective to describe music that wasn’t necessarily weird or noisy or ugly or unlistenable, but just wasn’t aimed at the mainstream target as deliberately. Lots of artists were just doing their thing and making consistently great music that just didn’t fit in next to what was on top-40 radio. Maybe they were underachievers? Maybe they lacked “rock star” qualities? Maybe they just weren’t interested in being the next Bon Jovi.

“Alternative” was an ambiguous term that arrived in the late 80s. Before the days of nano-genres and micro-scenes, we didn’t necessarily compartmentalize music to such a degree. You could like Elvis Costello AND Bad Brains AND Depeche Mode and no one cared. Some called it “College Rock”, some called it “New Wave,” but for the most part, we didn’t call it anything. It was just the music we liked.

I grew up on pop music. The Monkees and Bay City Rollers were what formed my childhood music obsession, but even then, I gravitated to the lesser-known songs for some reason. You can keep your trains to Clarksvilles and your Saturday nights, I was more interested in “Words” and “Rock and Roll Love Letter." I was always looking out for music that grabbed me personally, not just liking every song I heard.

So to bring us up to 1991, the “alternative” scene was all coming to a head with so many great artists that were doing their own things, not all sounding like cookie cutter bandwagon jumpers. There were a lot of great post-punk and art school bands as well as the whole “indie” scene in the UK, often referred to as the C86 scene, in honor of the NME magazine’s promotional cassette compilation from 1986 that made for a great list of who’s who in the underground pop scene. We had the whole wake of REM in the United States, as “The One I Love” was one of the first “underground” songs to chart on mainstream rock radio and get heavy rotation on MTV.

Speaking of MTV, probably the most important thing they ever did, in my opinion, was to launch a new program in 1986 called 120 Minutes. Airing at midnight on Sundays, it was a weekly connection to the “cool” music that kids in the suburbs who couldn’t get college radio stations in (or didn’t know about them in the first place!). This is where I learned about all things “Alternative,” from Robyn Hitchcock to Bauhaus to The Chickasaw Mudpuppies to Kate Bush. It was like a weekly course in what to listen to and what bands to follow in order to totally not fit in when you drag your sleepy ass to high school the following Monday morning.

Before 1991, all of this stuff was still pretty fringe. These artists were often relegated to the “indie” or “imports” bins at record stores. You could only hear them on low power college radio stations on the left side of the dial. Success meant something else to these artists, for the most part, than to become famous rock stars on the covers of magazines. They just wanted to make their music. Record labels might not have taken the chance to sink as much money into promoting them as the promise of a huge return wasn’t there. Many of these bands were on indie labels with less money to break a band to begin with.

To name some names: House of Love, Too Much Joy, The Ocean Blue, Springhouse, The Chills, Lloyd Cole, Toad the Wet Sprocket, The Verlaines, The Railway Children, The Reivers, Ultra Vivid Scene, The Blake Babies, The Wedding Present, The Lucy Show, The Bats, Comsat Angels, The Heart Throbs, The Bodines, The BoDeans, The Sundays, Innocence Mission, Lone Justice, The Connells, Love Tractor, House of Freaks… the list goes on and on.

When the record industry saw (made?) grunge break through and the embracing of the Lollapalooza crowd of what MTV was calling Alternative, labels tried to cash in on whatever they could. Major labels wanted some of the cred that indie labels had at that point so they made back door deals to funnel lots of their money and promotional pull into an indie label to break such and such a band while appearing to still be on a “cool” indie label, as to prime them to break into the mainstream. Once they broke, the major label would take over as the hard part was already done. Nowadays sometimes my we call this sort of thing being an “industry plant”. It’s not always the artist’s fault as they are just doing what they do, but who doesn’t want to be successful? (Don’t answer that: plenty of great artists have done a lot to sabotage their careers out of fear of being successful).

So what happened to all of those great bands that were just on the edge of a wider success, only to have the door closed on them before they were given the chance? It has become a cliche. The same old story. Signed to a label, recording an album that got shelved and kept the band in court for years until whatever grass roots momentum they had built up was gone. Slugging it out on smaller tours and never making enough money to quit their day jobs until they couldn’t afford to put up with the hassle anymore. Giving up their dream to get “real jobs”. Some changed course and priorities in life and got married and started families. Some got degrees and became doctors and astrophysicists

Some of them still do it. Some of them never stopped. Some of them started their own labels and had success on a smaller level but without owing millions of dollars to a major label. They make MORE money selling less product on their own than they ever would have on a major label.

Many people believe that if it’s not on the radio or on a major label, or more to the point, that if the music has never made its way into their periphery that it mustn’t be good. If it was good, we would have heard it, right?

Nope.

The record industry is just that, an industry. There are lots of instances of sleight of hand, smoke and mirrors. It’s not always the BEST music that gets to be successful in the mainstream. It’s not about art. It’s about commerce for these labels. It’s sort of always been that way, but at least in the past decades, we had legit tastemakers running labels and A&R departments who cared about cultivating a solid roster of great artists for their label. Then there were people like Mitch Miller who passed on The Beatles because rock and roll was a fad.

In 2025, things are very different and the playing field is much more even, but the field is infinitely bigger and, while it’s very easy to release music without the obligation of getting a record deal, it’s nearly impossible to be noticed by potential fans. There is also no one to vet your music as “good” or “bad,” as the A&R people at labels used to do. Objectively great music gets released amongst a plethora of less good music. How does the listener separate them without relying on an algorithm or playlists?

I never stopped listening to the artists that I could find one way or another, whose music I loved but who seemed to slip through the cracks between more well-known artists. I find that my sweet-spot of music that I like tends to live between those cracks. I listen to the ones from the 80s and 90s and brand new ones that I find every day today. It’s a beast I need to keep feeding. I am grateful to have stumbled upon the artists that I have.

What are some of your favorite artists that might fall into this category?