Alternative Metal

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    Alternative metal is... what the hell is it, anyway?

    OK, let's try this... you know Alternative Rock? Stuff like REM, Radiohead and They Might Be Giants? Well, imagine alternative rock. Imagine all its weirdness, all its... "alternativeness". Now, imagine that with the sonic amplitude of metal, and you've basically got Alt-Metal.

    Alt-metal started off in the mid-to-late-eighties as a response to Hair Metal, which was the commercial darling of MTV and had in many people's eyes reduced (non-underground) metal to a watered-down pop movement; consequently, alt-metal bands sought to bring back metal's original fire. There was no specific "scene" for alt-metal bands, and not even a specific sound, but they were all united by experimental flourishes and influences from other genres.

    The genre became popular in the late eighties/early nineties (around the same time that alt-rock got its big break) thanks to a few bands that are considered the founding members of the genre; these bands included Faith No More and Primus. A couple of years later, Tool took alt-metal and made it considerably darker.

    The genre is wide enough that bands will often have totally different sounds to each-other (compare Primus and Korn - do they sound the same?), which causes a fair bit of annoyance with people who like to categorise their bands. At the end of the day, though, alt-metal is a handy catch-all term for bands that are both arguably metal and hard to classify.

    See also Neoclassical Punk Zydeco Rockabilly, a trope that many alt-metal bands possessed.

    Bands typically classed as alt-metal include:
    Alternative Metal provides examples of the following tropes:
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