Alternative

The term "alternative" was coined in the 1980s to describe underground music that challenges the status quo and is fiercely iconoclastic, anti-commercial, and anti-mainstream, or punk rock-inspired bands on independent record labels that did not fit into the mainstream genres of the time. It arose as an extension of the phrases "new music" and "post modern", both for the freshness of the music and its tendency to re-contextualise the sounds of the past, which were commonly used by the music industry of the time to denote cutting-edge music.

Alternative music gained popular exposure in 1991 with the implementation of alternative music categories in the Grammy Awards and the MTV Video Music Awards. Alternative music branches out into various sub-genres, with the more popular ones being alternative rock, indie rock, funk metal and grunge.

This description is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses materials from the Wikipedia article "Alternative rock".