Current (1995-present)

With the death of Kurt Cobain, rock and roll music searched for a new face, sound, and trend. A second wave of alternative rock bands began to become popular, with grunge declining in the mid-90s. The Foo Fighters, Green Day and Radiohead spearheaded rock radio. In 1995, a Canadian pop star Alanis Morissette arose, and released Jagged Little Pill, a major hit that featured blunt, personally-revealing lyrics. It succeeded in moving the introspection that had become so common in grunge to the mainstream. The success of Jagged Little Pill spawned a wave of popularity in the late 90s of confessional rock releases by female artists including Jewel, Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, and Liz Phair. Many of these artists drew on their own alternative rock heroes from the 1980s and early 90s, including the folksy Tracy Chapman and various Riot Grrl bands. The use of introspective lyrics bled into other styles of rock, including those dubbed alternative.

The late 1990s brought about a wave of mergers and consolidations among US media companies and radio stations such as the Clear Channel Communications conglomerate. This has resulted in a homogenization of music available and the creation of artificially-hyped acts. Bands like blink 182 and Sum 41 defined pop punk at the end of the 90s. At this time, "nu-metal" began to take popular form, it contained a mix of grunge, metal, and hip-hop. Using downtuned 7 string guitars KoRn first created their heavy crushing riffs in 1994 with their first self-titled album. This then spawned a wave of "nu-Metal" bands such as Linkin Park, Slipknot, Static-X, Creed, Disturbed, Limp Bizkit and the sort. In the early 2000s the entire music industry was shaken by claims of massive theft of music rights using file-sharing tools such as Napster, resulting in lawsuits against private file-sharers by the recording industry group the RIAA.

After existing in the musical underground, garage rock finally saw a resurgence of popularity in the early 2000s, with bands like The White Stripes, The Strokes, Jet, The Vines and The Hives all releasing successful singles and albums. This wave is often referred to as back-to-basics rock because of it's sound. Currently popular rock trends include, "Emo", or Emotional music, which draws its style from softer punk and alternative rock styles from the 1980s. Many new bands have become well-known since 2001, including Jimmy Eat World, My Chemical Romance, Dashboard Confessional and Taking Back Sunday.

 

������������������������ UNDERGRAUND

During the 1960s the term underground acquired a new meaning in that it referred to members of the so-called counterculture, i.e. those people who did not necessarily conform to the mainstream of human experience such as e.g. hippies, Punks, and Mods .

�The Underground/counterculture Movement in the UK was linked to the Underground culture in America but had a number of key figures of its own and a different ��feel��. It focussed around the Ladbroke Grove/Notting Hill area of London.

Mick Farren describes eloquently (as usual) �My own feeling is that, not just sex, but anger and violence, are part and parcel of rock �n� roll. The rock concert can work as an alternative for violence, an outlet for violence. But at that time there were a lot of things that made us really angry. We WERE outraged! In the U.S. the youth were sent to Vietnam and there was nothing we could do to change the way the government did it. Smoking marijuana and doing things to get thrown in jail were our own way of expressing our anger, and we wanted change - I believed that picking up a guitar, not a gun, would bring about change�, (1).

��It's like Germaine Greer said about the Underground - it's not just some sort of scruffy club you can join, you're in or you're out... it's like being a criminal.���, (2).

The desire to change the status quo was a key feature of the whole Underground Movement both in the UK and America. Although another, the flamboyant clothing was a somewhat more superficial. For a ��true freak�� the movement signified much more. People spoke in terms of creating an alternative society and of anti-commercialism, the environment etc. Many in the blossoming �Underground Movement� were influenced by ��Beatnik�� Beat generation writers such as William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg so that it can be said that the beatniks of the 1950s paved the way for the hippies of the 1960s. During the 60�s, the Beatnik writers engaged in symbiotic evolution with freethinking academics including experimental Psychologists Timothy Leary. Those influenced included radical thinkers such as Mick Farren who as the new generation, would become equals to Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Leary. There was a lot of interaction and cross-fertilisation on the scene, and musicians took in new ideas instantly and transformed them, adding a pop sensibility which made this cultural stuff accessible to kids in the street. And example of the cross-over of beatnik poetry and music can be seen when Burroughs appeared at the Farren organised Phun City festival attended by Underground �community� bands including the Pretty Things, the Pink Fairies, The Edgar Broughton Band and from the America The MC5.

The Underground Movement was also symbolised by the use of drugs. The types of drugs used were varied and in many cases the names and effects were unknown as Deviants/Pink Fairies member Russell Hunter, working at International Times (part of the Underground press at the time, recalled. �People used to send in all kinds of strange drugs and things, pills and powders, stuff to smoke and that. They�d always give them to me to try to find out what they were! (Laughs)�. (Reference � personal conversation with author).

Part of the sense of humour of the Underground, no doubt partly induced by the effects of both drugs and radical thinking was an enjoyment at �freakin� out the norms�. Mick Farren recalls actions sure to elicit the required response. �The band's baroque House of Usher apartment on London's Shaftesbury Avenue had witnessed pre-Raphaelite hippy scenes, like Sandy the bass player (of the Deviants and Pink Fairies), Tony the now and again keyboard player, and a young David Bowie, fresh from Beckenham Arts Lab, sunbathing on the roof, taking photos of each other and posing coyly as sodomites�, (2).

There was a brief, tongue-in-cheek, offshoot from the UK Underground: "The Overground" was supposed to refer to the spiritual, cosmic, quasi-religious scene. At least two magazines (Gandalf's Garden and Vishtaroon) adopted this "overground" style and Gandalf's Garden was also a shop/restaurant/meeting place at World's End, Chelsea. The magazines were printed on pastel paper using multi-coloured inks and contained articles about meditation, vegetarianism, mandalas, ethics, poetry, pacifism and other subjects at a distance from the more wild and militant aspects of the underground.

During the 1960s the term underground acquired a new meaning in that it referred to members of the so-called counterculture, i.e. those people who did not necessarily conform to the mainstream of human experience such as e.g. hippies, Punks, and Mods .

Terry Anderson describes the early 1970s high point of the utopia of counterculture in his book The Movement and The Sixties:

"Liberal cities turned exotic as freaks and ethnics created a hip cultural renaissance. Street art flourished; color flooded the nation. Chicanos painted murals at high schools and 'walls of fire' on buildings. Black men wore jumbo Afros and the women sported vivid African dress. Young men with shaved heads and robes beat tambourines and chanted on corners, 'Krishna, Krishna, Hare Krishna.' Hip capitalists invaded the streets, setting up shops: Artisans wearing bandanas and bellbottom sold jewelry, bells, and leather, as sunlight streamed through cut glass. Communards in ragged bib overalls sold loaves of whole-wheat bread at co-ops and organically grown vegetables at farmers' markets. Freak flags flew, curling, waving across America. Carpenters wearing ponytails moved into decaying neighborhoods, paint and lumber in hand, and began urban homesteading. Longhairs blew bubbles or lofted frisbees in the park. Tribes of young men and women skinny-dipped at beaches and hippie hollows. A New America, or something new, was emerging." (Anderson 1995, p. 357)

Applied to the arts, the term underground typically means artists that are not corporately sponsored and don't generally want to be.

Underground comics were a sizeable industry in the 1970s, part of the Underground press which included newspapers like International Times and magazines like Oz. The comicstrips by artists like Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton appeared both in the underground newspapers and as separate comic books and many of these latter are still being published today.

Underground can also mean that something is really groundbreaking and therefore is not mainstream.

Perhaps the best way to define it is a quote by Frank Zappa:

"The mainstream comes to you, but you have to go to the underground."

An alternate usage of the term "underground" is in reference to something that is illegal or so controversial that it would be dangerous for it to be publicized. Or it's so controversial (as in, offensive to societal norms) that it will never be mainstream. Some authors/artists use this as a badge of pride.

Examples:
An underground club might have illicit drugs readily available.
A movie is banned because people might imitate the actions of the characters.

In Economics, the term underground culture refers more or less to the parallel market (underground market) and the orthodox of the individuals who sell good and services and consume those goods and services.

eg. Prostitution markets or illegal drug trading