While the term "alternative" has been retroactively applied to a huge swath of artists stretching back to the Velvet Underground and others in the 1960s, most people became aware of the term in the early '90s, when it was plucked out of the underground and began to receive a lot of mainstream media coverage. From the bands of Seattle to such popular tours as Lollapalooza and HORDE, alternative in the literal sense began to have a shorter and shorter shelf-life, as yesterday's alternative to the mainstream would become tomorrow's mainstream itself.
The seeds for the '90s alternative explosion were sown in the '80s, when the music was better known as "college rock," named for the demographic to which it initially appealed. Some of these bands, such as REM, U2, and Talking Heads, crossed over into the mainstream, while others, like The Replacements, The Pixies, The Minutemen, and Husker Du, were known more for their influence on later bands than for being very popular during their lifespan.
In the '90s, enough fans from the '80s had grown up and started their own bands, record labels, and other creative small businesses to warrant serious attention to the changes that were taking place. Add to this a rock audience that was beginning to grow weary of hair band excess and the plasticity of Phil Collins style over-production, that was eager for what they perceived as more "honest" music, and one can see the mainstream success of alternative taking shape.
The first branch of alternative music to really break into the public consciousness was that of the bands from the Seattle, WA, scene, popularly labeled "grunge," who rose from independent record labels like Sub Pop and an overall do-it-yourself culture to become MTV staples, stadium touring juggernauts, and questions on Jeopardy! The commercial success of such bands as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains brought every major label A&R representative up to the great northwest for a long weekend to find the next breakthrough success.
Running concurrent to this development were many local music scenes throughout the country that began to gain attention due to the growing emphasis on community and artistic diversity within the alternative movement. The first Lollapalooza tour laid the groundwork for many of the conventions that would come after, uniting such disparate bands as organizer Perry Farrell's Jane's Addiction, Living Colour, Nine Inch Nails, and Ice T. In later years, the tour would go on to feature a virtual who's who of '90s alternative artists (and hold-overs from earlier times), with Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beastie Boys, Primus, Rage Against the Machine, Beck, Pavement, Smashing Pumpkins, The Ramones, and dozens more.
The other major festival of this era was HORDE, standing for Horizons Of Rock Developing Everywhere. While initially featuring mostly bands from the jam band community such as Phish, Blues Traveler, and Widespread Panic (earning it the alternate nickname of Hippies On Recreational Drugs Everywhere), it morphed in later years to feature many of the same artists as Lollapalooza as well as other more adventurous bands and musicians that couldn't as easily be pigeonholed.
As the decade progressed, the term alternative began to enter the popular culture to such a degree that people began to ask "Alternative to what?" The problem was, alternative was never a distinct musical style, in that you couldn't say it all had detuned guitars, pessimistic lyrics, and shouted baritone vocals. In many ways, it was more of a grassroots strategy to bring new and interesting music to a larger audience, and one that would get a further boost from the growing internet culture of the decade as well. While most bands still pursued major label contracts, many were finding different ways to build their fan-base online and through word of mouth.
And really all of this doesn't even scratch the surface of all the artists that were labeled alternative throughout the '90s. Low-fi greats like Pavement and Guided by Voices could be filed next to California punk bands from Green Day to the Offspring and alternative country artists like Uncle Tupelo or the Jayhawks. Rap had the Roots and De La Soul. Ska got big with the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Even swing music from the '30s and '40s started making a comeback in an "alternative" incarnation with Brian Setzer, Cherry Poppin' Daddies, and Squirrel Nut Zippers.
This highlights another characteristic of '90s alternative-its ability to crossbreed. Nirvana was just the early Beatles as filtered through the Pixies, but the result was something else entirely. Beck shattered all notions of genre by ping-ponging from folk to hip hop to lounge music to his own mixtures of style. This was taken to absurd extremes by the band Ween, who had the ability to both adopt and subvert virtually any style one could throw at them. The jam band and roots music scenes were also known for mixing styles, often bringing in bluegrass, funk, prog rock, Caribbean, and barbershop to the conventional rock format.
As the '90s were coming to an end, the internet had gained an even more widespread influence, and with it niche markets that continued to flourish. Whereas in the early '90s MTV and the record companies were able to present a unified Alternative Nation (the name of an MTV program which, along with 120 Minutes, helped to popularize alternative music), the late '90s showed the beginnings of a multitude of alternatives from all over the world. Fans and artists began to communicate more and more with each other and all sorts of alternatives began to find wider audiences.
Though still in use today, the '90s will always be known as the era when alternative music peaked, giving rise to a diverse assortment of exciting new bands and popularizing older fringe artists as well. For a long time it really was the alternative, something different than what was being offered by a music industry that was perhaps playing it too safe and worrying more about the business than the music itself.