536 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
The artistic recognition that jazz has received in recent years testifi es not only
to its new position in American music but also to the way the elements of jazz cut
across the three spheres of music. Rooted in black folk music, jazz has also relied
on the popular sphere for repertory and forms; the careers of jazz musicians are
still mostly carried on in the popular sphere’s marketplace, but some have identi-
fi ed with the traditional sphere (chiefl y African) and others more with the classi-
cal concert hall and the academy. Finally, once jazz is recorded, it can be analyzed
historically, culturally, and technically with the help of approaches developed in
the classical sphere. Works that pass muster may then be treated as part of a tran-
scendent musical legacy. Thus a music that was once socially controversial, linked
in the minds of some with a lack of schooled musicianship and sometimes with
unreliable conduct, enjoys today the respected status due a full-fl edged art form.ROCK, ROOTS, AND REBELLION
By the 1990s the cyclic pattern of rock history—rebellion, commodifi cation, and
reformation—showed signs of accelerating into a nonstop spin. Rock and roll
had originated in the 1950s as a rebellious “outsider” music—chiefl y because it
was aimed at a teenage market, for which no previous musical style had been
created. But by the 1970s, as the story goes, it had accommodated itself to the
mainstream popular music industry so fully that its listeners began to fi nd it a
toothless lion, still capable of an occasional roar but with no bite. Punk rock, the
1970s reformation movement that restored rock’s outsider status, had by the end
of the decade already smoothed its rough edges to become MT V-friendly New
Wave. The hardcore punk reformation of the 1980s likewise combed its hair and
became radio-friendly college rock. By the end of the 1980s heav y metal and rap
had found a home on MT V. Today, rebellion, commodifi cation, and reformation
describe not successive developmental stages but rather different aspects of a
segmented musical marketplace.
Since the 1990s a highly polished mainstream music, aimed at teens and
even preteens, has shared the media with an array of outsider music, such as
alternative rock, jam bands, singer-songwriters, and roots musicians of various
stripes. Although anticommercialism is a common posture in outsider music,
some musicians have found it to be highly profi table, raising the uncomfortable
possibility that the anti-mainstream stance is now part of the mainstream, and
that nonconformity is the new orthodoxy—in which case, the very notion of a
“mainstream” is called into question.ALTERNATIVE ROCK AND ITS ALTERNATIVES
From the 1990s to the present day, alternative rock has been in a state of seemingly
permanent rebellion against what its adherents consider to be a crassly commer-
cial, inauthentic mainstream. In contrast to such popular 1990s mainstream acts
as the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and Britney Spears, alternative rock is distin-
guished by a set of values derived from punk: the musical texture is dominated by
loud, distorted guitars; song lyrics tend to be angry and nihilistic; displays of vir-
tuosity are rejected in favor of a deliberately amateurish, do-it-yourself aesthetic;
and clothing and hairstyles tend to be ostentatiously unostentatious.172028_22_531-558_r3_sd.indd 536 23/01/13 11:20 AM