In the late 1980s and 1990s, MTV's program 120 Minutes served as a crucial gateway for underground music to reach mainstream audiences. The show curated artists like Kate Bush, Sonic Youth, Public Enemy, Björk, and PJ Harvey, introducing them to television audiences worldwide. This programming represented a unique moment when a major broadcast network organized a canon of counter-cultural music, presenting it as a genuine alternative to mainstream Top 40 hits. For someone born in the late 1990s, watching these archives evokes a sense of nostalgia—not just for the music itself, but for what that openness represented.
The Meaning of \"Alternative\"\n\nWhat made underground music genuinely \"alternative\" was its oppositional nature. While mainstream pop trafficked in clichés and plasticky sounds, using technology to smooth out edges rather than experiment, the underground deliberately courted old avant-garde styles: shock, weirdness, queerness, noise, and general aesthetic discordance. This music was resolutely not pop—it didn't aspire to be mainstream pop. It wanted to be more than pop, or broader than pop, or perhaps anti-pop.
This model collapsed by the 2010s. Alternative radio stations began playing Imagine Dragons, classic rock stations played Nirvana, and MTV became better known for Snooki than for innovative music programming. The Generation X Slacker was superseded by the Millennial Hipster, and \"indie\" supplanted \"alternative\" as the meaningless descriptor of the moment.
A Proposed Millennial Alternative\n\nIf earlier generations had 120 Minutes, young Millennials and elder Zoomers had nothing comparable. Between 2008 and roughly 2018, there emerged something akin to an alternative underground—often heavily electronic music, or a general vibe created by a generation enthralled by the infinite crate-digping properties of the Internet. There was virtually no central place, no kept gate like 120 Minutes, via which this foment might be properly gathered, curated, and beamed out towards any widespread youth culture.
Yet Smith argues that something exciting happened in this period: in an inversion of previous eras, there was a boom of less-than-popular artists who were actually making the best unapologetic pop music. A faction of the underground aspired to make huge, triumphant pop music—and was succeeding—while the mainstream pumped out what Smith calls \"the worst glitzy, infantile crap any generation had ever been subjected to.\"
This is a eulogy for a vision that never quite materialized into collective availability as an idea, a style, or a genuine counter-culture. The main wave of the best Millennial alternative pop was split between artists on major labels and independent acts bubbling up online before going bigger.
Artists in the Proposed Canon\n\nThe first precursors include Cut Copy's first record Bright Like Neon Love from 2004, the best of Hot Chip, Annie, Robyn's self-titled album from 2005, and LCD Soundsystem's Sound of Silver from 2007. These artists worked at the confluence of electronic music and pop, absorbing things like house music and hip-hop, beginning to fuse together something as accessible as it was smart.
The Gothenburg geniuses The Knife are especially relevant here. Their track \"Heartbeats\" from 2003 represents one of the first examples of electronic pop that feels unmistakably twenty-first century—it still sounds tremendous, classic, perhaps even more relevant today than upon release.
The first major turning-point came in 2007 with MGMT's first and only good record, Oracular Spectacular. Their highest Spotify stream counts are in the billions now, though they had relatively big success at the time for the kind of group they were—indie-coded but really on a major label. \"Kids\" ended up on Gossip Girl, went to number ninety-one on Billboard, becoming a kind of sleeper anthem.
Smith calls \"Time to Pretend\" one of the great Millennial pop songs. It didn't even crack the Billboard Top 100 in 2007—unlike \"Irreplaceable\" or \"Umbra\"—but now feels outside its time rather than trapped by it. This represents one main difference between truly great Millennial pop and the stuff mass audiences were listening to: it signifies its time but isn't trapped by it.
Smith's fantasy of an alternative canon begins here—a song produced differently, just as anthemic, memorable, catchy, and totally accessible, yet with little to do with the flattened-out, dumbed-down, dynamic-free landscape perfected by mega-producers from Max Martin to Benny Blanco.