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