Is the “alt-” in alt rock the “alt-” in alt-right?

After my “Alt Rock to Alt Right” panel at the 2024 American Musicological Society, my friend Brian Wright (buy his book!) half-jokingly asked me whether the ‘alt’ in alt-rock is the ‘alt’ in alt-right. (The joke is that I published an article titled “Is the post-in post-identity the post in post-genre?,” which is itself a riff on Appiah’s “Is the post-in postmodernism the post- in postcolonial?”) That’s a good question.

According to THE scholar of what makes alternative music ‘alternative’ (and my AMS co-panelist), Theo Cateforis, the term ‘alternative’ was well-established in the music industry and music press by the late 1960s and evolved over the next several decades. As Cateforis writes in his chapter “Alternative Before Alternative,”

The concept of ‘an alternative’ was associated with the oppositional politics and lifestyle of the counterculture and corresponding rock revolution of the 1960s; it circulated as a descriptive word to signify a more authentic, generally rock-oriented, option to the polished, professional world of pop; and the rise of alternative media, encompassing everything from progressive FM and college radio to regional musician organizations, pointed to alternate pathways within the music industry (121).

In its first common usage in the American music industry, “alternative” connoted countercultural and non-mainstream values and practices, including artistic sensibilities specifically rooted in rock aesthetics and their privileging of things like authenticity, rebellion, and masculinity (i.e., not being ‘pop,’ which is coded feminine). The music industry tapped into the fact that the term “alternative” has long connoted a rejection of non-chosen options to position “alternative” as the rejection of non-rock (such as pop) and all those who don’t belong in the rock world (like the white women and people of color ex-Rolling Stone head Jan Werner infamously cast out of rock mastery in his 2023 book). “By the early 1970s,” Cateforis explains, “alternative had definitively emerged as a word connoting rock’s authentic presence in the face of a fabricated pop mainstream” (115). In this context, the label “alternative” positions adherents as both marginal underdogs and knowing elites (i.e., not gullible teenyboppers). 

Disidentifying with mainstream white masculinity in this way, “alternative” takes up rock’s underlying politics of hipness. As scholars such as myself and Ingrid Monson have shown, hipness is a practice or aesthetic whereby white men appropriate stereotypical Black masculinity as a way to disidentify with run-of-the-mill or “square” bourgeois white masculinity and claim an elite status over other white men (and Black people, and white women). As Mimi Haddon has argued, the post-punk music that was originally tracked on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart and which later morphed into 90s alternative distinguished itself from mainstream rock by identifying with different genres of Black music—disco and dub reggae rather than blues. In this respect, “alternative” represented an even more marginal and elite subgroup of white dudes than even regular rockers, like rock-style hipness on steroids. This is the first way that the “alt” in alt-rock positions tired old hierarchies as a purportedly new voice of dissent.

It is perhaps unsurprising that the American music industry and music press understand “alternative” in primarily capitalist terms as a market behavior. According to Cateforis, ”Alternative’s true flowering emerged in the mid to late twentieth century…this language of choice and options became a crucial signature” (111). This language of choice and options presents “alternative” rock/music as just another type of speciality product in a crowded marketplace: it’s not a subculture, it’s not a scene, it’s more like a brand. Framed as a brand, alternative is no longer actually counterculture; it has been folded into the mainstream music industry as an aesthetic that connotes counterculture without any of its benefits or obligations (like giving and receiving support for creative projects). After Nirvana’s Nevermind blew up, that style centered around grungy guitar rock; however, as the later 90s and early 2000s wore on, multiple “alternatives” proliferated, such as alt-country, alt-Latino, indie dance, and so on. As Cateforis put it, when “alternative” is understood in market terms, “the unabashedly commercial styles of previous eras can be resuscitated and reimagined as viable alternatives” (117). For example, in 2001 The Strokes’ garage rock was celebrated (some would say overhyped) as a return-to-roots alternative to Nickleback-y “alt rock” filling the FM dial on corporate alt rock radio. In its market-based conception, “alternative”’s content is as fungible as money and commodities.

As my colleague and other AMS co-panelist Alex Reed argued in his presentation, one of the reasons that far-right figures like R1chard Sp3ncer and everyone’s favorite social media platform owner can hear “leftist anthems” like Rage Against The Machine’s “Killing In The Name” as aligned with their ideology is because fascism itself relies on an underlying practice of rendering all content fungible. Alex discussed how fascism reduces all time to the present, flattening the difference of the past and the future into the singular present to which there could be, to use Margaret Thatcher’s phrase, no other alternative. (As in Hegel’s dialectic of sense-certainty, the fascist “now” can refer to this specific moment because it has no further determination and can refer to any specific moment.) If “alternative” has no inherent intent or commitments, then it is little more than a tool for repackaging old stuff in new ways (such as extracting new value out of old intellectual property). As Cateforis writes, ”no matter how one views alternative’s meaning…its code of rebellion is always in danger of being co-opted for dubious means” (120). Though Cateforis, like a classic 90s Gen Xer, is referring to the commercial music industry/selling out in his accusations of dubiousness, this claim can apply equally well to fascism as it does to capitalism. The American, market-based concept of alternative can represent old hierarchies as new dissent, but it targets that dissent in no particular direction, making it just as easy for the owner of Tesla to claim the label “alt” and the sounds of alt rock as it is for Tom Morello to do so.

Sp3ncer explicitly calls on “alt-”’s fungibility as a way to deflect scrutiny from the alt-right’s stated aims, much in the same way comedians call on the the fungibility of meaning in jokes and irony when they deflect criticism for harmful statements by passing them off as humor and play (see also Cateforis’s new work on alt rock irony and this new article from Sam de Bose). Because Richard S is the person generally credited with coining the term, NPR asked him to define “alt-right”; he said, “In some ways the alt-right is arbitrary. I mean, the whole point is that this is a movement of consciousness and identity for European people in the 21st century. That’s what it is. If you don’t like it, you can, you know, talk about linguistics.” He begins by claiming some equivocality to the term, then enumerates some under-defined terms that could mean “white pride” but could also not mean that (there have been non-white people on the continent millennia), and closes with the rejection of any sort of critical analysis of such equivocation in meaning. By both using and rejecting the inherent instability of signification (hi, Derrida!), this definition of “alt-right” performs the fungibility of meaning central to the American, market-based sense of “alternative.” In this respect, the alt- in alt-right is precisely the sense of “alt-” bequeathed to us by the music industry at the turn of the millennium. 

Like the “alt-” in alt rock, the “alt-” in alt-right is also used to zhuzh up well-worn biases by presenting them as something supposedly new and different. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “At the heart of the alt-right is a break with establishment conservatism” figured as Cold War-style emphases on “liberty, freedom, free markets and capitalism.” Here, “alt-” signals the fact of being antiestablishment and unorthodox; the article’s list of ideologies bundled under the “alt-right” umbrella are so varied–from tradCaths to techbros–that it seems like there’s no specific conservative tradition in the crosshairs and that the alt-right is less a response to a particular ideological disagreement and more about the performativity of the “alt-”. Like what Sara Ahmed calls new materialism’s “founding gesture” — its claim to be ‘new’ in its overcoming of traditional biases that it nevertheless reaffirms — the “alt-” in “alt-right” enacts a performance of a break moreso than it describes a substantive ideological shift in the underlying conceptual grounds. It’s more important to create the sense of newness than it is to offer different and unorthodox content. For example, although the SLPC reports that “Alt-right adherents stridently reject egalitarianism and universalism,” these fundamental tenets of classical liberalism were designed to be fully compatible with chattel slavery, colonialism, cisheteropatriarchy, Jim Crow, and capitalism. There is nothing actually egalitarian or universalist in postwar conservatism. So, just as the alt-rock boom allowed for the re-centering of cishetero white guys on the top of the pop charts to be presented as something new and fresh rather than reactionary, the “alt-” in alt-right similarly makes overt racism seem like a fresh new angle on American conservatism.

Grounded in a similar concern that the “alt-” in “alt-right” launders old ideas in supposedly new, less controversial clothes, The Associated Press recommends that journalists “avoid using the term generically and without definition, however, because it is not well known and the term may exist primarily as a public-relations device to make its supporters’ actual beliefs less clear and more acceptable to a broader audience. In the past we have called such beliefs racist, neo-Nazi or white supremacist” (emphasis mine). The European Center for Populism Studies likewise finds that the term alt-right is “ill-defined” as it is used by and applied to a range of ideological positions with a common commitment to overt white supremacy: “Alt-right adherents identify with a range of different ideologies that put white identity at their centers.” Just as “alternative” once referred to a “rock authenticity” that centered white cishetero men to the exclusion of others, the “alt-right” seems like a way to make white patriarchy seem less extreme than it is.

There are a number of ways that the alt- in alt rock and the alt- in alt-right are philosophically, conceptually, and linguistically similar. But they are also genealogically connected. I’ve written before about how they seem to both be analogous responses to the same underlying political economy of media. They are like parallel evolutions to the same environment in different contexts. But they are also directly connected. In 2005, not long after JD Vance graduated from high school, the program director of the grandaddy of all modern rock radio stations KROQ Kevin Weatherly told the New York Times that alt rock was “red state rock.” In the US, a “red state” is a deeply conservative one where voters, politicians, and media tend to favor gun rights, Christian nationalism disguised as so-called freedom of religion, and free markets, and dislike civil rights of any sort, women’s lib, the “gay agenda”, communists, immigrants, abortion, and the like. Especially given the then-recent jingoistic single “Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue (The Angry American)” from Toby Keith and The Chicks’ getting cancelled for speaking out against Republican president George W. Bush’s hawkish approach to Iraq and Afghanistan, in the 2000s country was the stereotypically “red state” musical genre. (As this book explains, there were reasons for that.) However, the radio industry of the late 90s and early aughts explicitly set alt rock up up to be the, um, “alternative” to country. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulated radio ownership by removing FCC limits on the number of stations any one company or individual could own in a single market. This led to huge corporations like Clear Channel and CBS vacuuming up every station they could get. In a number of cases, that meant companies had to decide how to format stations in each market so they weren’t overlapping and competing with their sibling stations. When a company already owned a country station in a particular market, they tended to format new acquisitions in that market as, you guessed it, alternative rock. Like country, the alternative format was demographically targeted to white people (typically white men 18-24); that’s why it made sense as a compliment to country – alt rock targeted more or less the same red-state-y demographic in a somewhat different way. Hitching the alt rock format to red state demographics, the millennial radio industry made alt rock itself lean more conservative than it might have otherwise.

The alt- in alt rock has a lot in common with the alt- in alt right. Though there is no 1:1 correspondence between the two conceptually or sociologically, it’s valuable to think through their relationship because they are both fundamentally mediated phenomena and our understanding of how “alt rock” blew up and became a Thing can help us think more carefully about what the alt right is, how it works, and why it exists NOW. For example, alt rock’s story is significantly a story about a financializing radio industry, just as the alt right’s story is significantly a story about a financialized tech industry. Elon Musk and Billy Joe Armstrong may have little more in common than they both spent lots of time in California, but at the structural level the movements they are each associated with seem to be much more closely intertwined.