Introduction and Explanation

The purpose of this blog is to help foster and promote an appreciation of rock music that falls within a more "alternative" domain. That's not to say that every topic of discussion is going to highly esoteric and obscure in nature, but rather to create a better understanding of the thoughts I feel lay behind the idea of "alternative" acts. There are several reasons I chose to focus my attention on this. First of all, more mainstream acts already have a wide variety of coverage, simply as a by-product of being mainstream. Secondly, I personally find alternative acts to be more more interesting. Rock music as a whole is not a particularly artistic genre of music. It's "innovations" (or rather, pseudo-innovations) are usually derived from entirely different genres of music. In a sense rock music is less a genre in it's own right and more an assimilation of various ideas that originate from entirely different schools of music. By this point, rock has already adopted ideas and principles from electronic music, classical, jazz ,blues and the avant-garde, to name a few. I believe alternative acts help push rock beyond simply adopting the inventions of other genres and instead promote a much higher degree of original thought and aesthetic development. Consequently, a rather low bar of quality is placed on rock music and the idea of assimilating other genres ideas is considered as ground-breaking as actually coming up with entirely new ideas. This is, of course, promoted by the fact that the average rock listener has absolutely no knowledge of rock's history, let alone music history, and, thus can't distinguish between invention and convention. This is group of people who believe that psychedelic music is made up of whimsical pop tunes and people who equate commercial success with actual talent. Most importantly it's a group of people who, despite professing a love of rock music, still think of it as mere entertainment and not a real form of artistic expression. With this blog I hope to increase awareness of less well-known acts and, hopefully, promote an appreciation of rock's alternative side.