Around a year ago, the alternative rock station in my area died. Truth be told, I hadn't listened to it that much for a couple years before it passed on. Much like Hot Topic, I had outgrown the station and the type of music it promised. I had used to have a kind of trepidation about listening to the station when I was younger because it was 'adult' and I could get in trouble for listening to it. At nearly thirty, I had trepidation listening to the station because I felt like a dad pretending he was hip and with it and thinking about daring to walk into that Hot Topic again, even if doing so would be one of the single most embarrassing things I could do.
A few months ago, a new alternative music station arose to take it's place. I had to admit I was intrigued, and decided to turn it on. Even if it wasn't the kind of music I found myself listening to all that much anymore, it was still a form I could find quite a bit of enjoyment in.
Long story short, it wasn't the same.
The station was dedicated to playing music and just music. No commercials, no DJs, just song after song. In a lot of ways, that sounds nice. Commercials are annoying at best, and sometimes the commercials are even preferable to the DJs, or more likely to get a laugh. But the problem is that the station had no soul, and that was something that the previous alternative station had in spades.
I grew up listening to the previous alternative station in the late 90s through into 2011, from middle school until I finished undergrad. It's interesting, because you don't recognize what a scene is at first, but there was definitely a scene at that time around alternative music, and the stations that played it embodied this fact. Alternative was still at a point where it was different and challenging and breaking away from most of the rock scene. It wasn't quite punk, though it had roots in that movement, and the attitude that followed from it meshed into alternative. Much like the idea of alternative comics, there was an edge to alternative music and the culture that surrounded it.
A lot of this edge was actually embodied in the station that played it. Their bumpers were quirky and culturally hip. They were, for lack of a better word, counter culture, but the safe kind of counter culture. You were holding safety scissors when you were listening to them, but you were still running with those scissors. The station covered a variety of alternative forms too. They'd have throwbacks to early 90s alternative. Some nights they'd cover local shows. Listening to that station was very much being part of a culture, and you were part of that culture because there was something there.
As paradoxical as it sounds, just listening to song after contemporary song isn't anything. Because in the end alternative wasn't just the music. It was the talking heads and bumpers and everything else that followed that had the brand 'alternative' latched to it that bled into that music.
Alternative wasn't just the music. It was everything surrounding it. And much of what's surrounding it is, where I live, gone.