What would you call Alternative?

This is a random question, but what qualifies as alternative. It seems like of all the genres out there, alternative really couldn't be more broad. If you tuned into a hard rock station, the songs would be pretty similar, dropped d tuned, similar rhythms, structures, tones, etc. Listen to a pop station, you get the same chord progressions over and over. Turn on hip hop and I dare you to hear a song without autotune. Pick jazz, you get piano and guitar solos with soft drums.

But what is alternative then? I just can't put my finger on it as a genre. I was listening to the Sirius alternative station today and four songs in a row came on and each sounded completely different from the last. It just seems to me that alternative music has pegs farthest from the center of the map.

How would you define alternative music? What are the unifying themes in alt music?

What is so great about concerts? And a new great band (but not in a "this is a great new band way).

"I spent a little time on the MOUNTAIN!"

Jackie Greene was opening for Gov't Mule at the Riviera Theater in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago. The Riviera is a great venue, built during the end of World War I and no longer the cinema it used to be, and just the place to discover the "Next Great Band." I am not going to sit here and pontificate about how so-and-so is going to revolutionize music and so forth. But rather, this is an appreciate for live music and the hard working artists that work themselves to exhaustion to bring us an experience unlike any other.

So I come back to Jackie Greene, who is belting out his song New Speedway Boogie which features the very catchy hook in the chorus at the beginning of this post, and by the third time through, a line that everyone knows and sings with Jackie. It is a quintessential bonding experience, where no more than 200 hundred people come together one refrain at a time. But, as I am prone to do, let us dissect his set of no more than eight songs and less than an hour. In that hour, someone who I knew absolutely nothing about can create everything that is great about the human experience out of thin air.

New Speedway Boogie is a well crafted jam that dawdles around before building to a rock chorus that gets everyone singing, particularly those with a drink in their hand. It moves between funky quieter parts and then lets loose as Jackie wails the chorus to a group of his new friends. It reflects life really. Nice and slow, a little funky, until the big payoff of screaming your lungs out with your friends who you may or may not really know. The workweek packed into ten minutes!

The rest of his set is about the trouble we have finding love, life, and happiness, and sometimes that when we find it, it wasn't quite what we were looking for. The poor guy only has an hour to divulge everything he has learned in his life and spent a decade putting into song to us in less an hour. But we identify and begin to feel what he's talking about in a fleeting moment of connection to him, his band, and everyone around me in the crowd. So we clap and let him know we appreciate his hard work and move along. I feel like I can tell you what makes him tick, how he feels a lot of the time, what goes through his head, and so on, or maybe he's just a talented entertainer and has us all fooled. But I like to leave thinking I have some insight into his soul and maybe he has a little into mine.