What if the best pop music of the last two decades was made by artists nobody heard? Justin E. H. Smith argues that the generation born after Kurt Cobain's suicide missed something crucial: a curated alternative music movement. The result is an entire canon of brilliant pop hiding in plain sight -- and Smith wants to build it.
The Mirror That Wasn't
Smith spent a week watching MTV's 120 Minutes, which defined "alternative" for over a decade and briefly opened a door for underground artists to reach mainstream audiences. The problem? Millennials and Zoomers had nothing comparable.
The 1986 to 2000 run of 120 Minutes wasn't just a television program. It constructed an entire cultural context for the music it showcased, blending solid journalism with commercial imperatives while genuinely representing youth culture's cutting edge. By 1992, only one year into the world's brief courtship with Cobain and company, the show was already larding its year-end countdowns with the history of the new insurgent underground.
Watching 120 Minutes now feels like gazing into a mirror that reveals how briefly that door remained open. A lot of dross got through, certainly -- convenient new market categories for major labels to exploit. But so did groundbreaking music: artists like Kate Bush, Sonic Youth, Public Enemy, Bjork, and PJ Harvey, all interviewed while their videos played on normal televisions.
It's hard to imagine any channel organizing a canon of the not-quite-popular, vaguely-counter-cultural mass-art the way 120 Minutes did. For someone born in 1994 -- a few weeks after Cobain's suicide -- watching the program now evokes something like genuine sadness. Not only were things more diverse and open, but those people understood exactly what they had. They knew they were curating something different from the mainstream.
The generation that followed didn't get that same clarity. From roughly 2008 onward, there was something akin to an emerging alternative: heavily electronic music, a vibe created by a generation with the infinite crate-digging properties of the internet, handed unprecedented democracy of accessible synthesis and cheap production software. But there was no central place like 120 Minutes -- no kept gate via which this foment might be gathered, curated, and beamed out towards any widespread youth culture.
The Poptimism Problem
Much has been made recently about whether the term "poptimism" holds any usefulness. Music journalism since the later 2010s argued the field was too white and male and rock-obsessed, that genres like hip-hop, R&B, and high-charting pop were still overlooked in favor of more overtly album-oriented genres.
Smith fully accepts that when Pitchfork changed, it changed in a defanged and generally poptimist direction. Rolling Stone went that way too -- and went harder. But the music Smith has in mind was unique. Though much of the great alternative music of the late 2000s and early 2010s still fits those distinctions -- particularly where niche internet subcultures were involved -- a lot simply doesn't.
What made underground music of decades past "alternative" was its oppositionality. The mainstream trafficked in cliches and plasticky sounds, using newest technologies to smooth out edges instead of experimenting. Meanwhile, the underground deliberately courted old avant-garde styles: shock, weirdness, queerness, noise -- aesthetic discordance. It was resolutely not pop.
But something changed. By the early 2010s, there was a boom of less-than-popular artists who were in fact making the best unapologetic pop music. A faction of the underground aspired to make huge, triumphant pop music while the mainstream doddered on, pumping out the worst glitzy, infantile crap any generation had ever been subjected to.
The Proposed Canon
The main wave of the best Millennial alterna-pop -- roughly 2009 to 2018 -- was split. Though plenty of artists on major labels belong in this loose canon, most of the interesting stuff bubbled up much less dramatically online before going bigger. A lot of it was made up of independent bands, duos, or producers on historic indie labels like 4AD, Domino Recording Co., Sub Pop, Captured Tracks, Polyvinyl, and XL Recordings.
And a lot of it started within emerging niche microgenres with ridiculous names: vaporwave, chillwave, witch house, hypnagogic pop -- deliberately hazy, nostalgic music that toyed with what critics called "hauntology" to varying degrees of accuracy. But sometimes it was just outright pop, better and richer than anything the mainstream was offering.
The 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. Nothing like the overly sleek mid-2000s rock bands they shared festival billings with -- Bloc Party, The Killers, Franz Ferdinand. Nor like folky artists like Bon Iver or Fleet Foxes, or arty ones like Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors, Animal Collective.
Rather, these were artists working at the confluence of electronic music and pop, savvy musicians who had absorbed house music and hip-hop, beginning to fuse together something as accessible as it was smart. The Knife are especially relevant here -- though they were too weird and frequently too harsh to really cross over, their influence has hung around for decades.
"Heartbeats" is one of the first examples in 2003 of an electronic pop that feels unmistakably 21st-century. It's hard to imagine "Heartbeats" having existed in anything but the present millennium. It still sounds tremendous. Classic.
The first major turning-point came in 2007 with MGMT's first and only good record, Oracular Spectacular. These days their music shows up in films when people try to do a Naughties period piece -- like Saltburn -- and their highest Spotify stream counts are in the billions.
MGMT had relatively big success at the time for the kind of group they were: indie-coded but really on a major label, and Pitchfork itself didn't quite approve. "Kids" ended up on Gossip Girl, went to number 91 on Billboard, becoming a kind of sleeper anthem. The record itself went to number 38 on the album charts.
Now the record feels charming, often dated, except for those justifiably beloved singles: "Kids," "Electric Feel," and especially "Time to Pretend" -- one of the great Millennial pop songs. It felt that way when first heard: finally, here was something that didn't sound like any other era, belonging to the young people of its own time. Plus it sounded great.
Though that hardly mattered in 2007: "Time to Pretend" didn't even crack the Billboard Top 100. The fantasy where it was as big a hit that year as "Irreplaceable" or "Umbrella" -- good pop songs, but ones that now sound completely of their time while "Time to Pretend" feels outside it.
This might be 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. There was nothing which actually separates a song like "Time to Pretend" from the big hits of its time -- only that it was produced differently. Yet it's just as anthemic, memorable, catchy, and totally accessible.
But it has little to do with the flattened-out, dumbed-down, dynamic-free landscape perfected by mega-producers from Max Martin to Benny Blanco.
Critics might note that Smith's canon risks the same exclusionary gatekeeping he criticizes mainstream outlets for -- just replacing one set of tastemakers with another. The underground artists he celebrates were overwhelmingly white and Western, and his framework leaves little room for the genuinely innovative pop emerging from K-pop, Afrobeats, and Latin music during the same period.
Bottom Line
Smith's strongest argument is that the collapse of gatekeeping institutions like 120 Minutes didn't democratize taste -- it eliminated the infrastructure for discovering genuinely adventurous pop. His biggest vulnerability is nostalgia: the essay longs for a curatorial authority that may never have been as inclusive or effective as he remembers. But the core insight holds -- somewhere between 2009 and 2018, the underground was making better pop than the mainstream, and almost nobody noticed.