That situation got a little better this year. I won't overstate the willingness of writers to look back on the nineties throughout 2025, but the year did begin with Tanya Pearson's Pretend We're Dead: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Women in Rock in the '90s, which dealt with one of the decade's most important phenomena, and a few months later there was Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour's Lollapalooza, which orally, historically dealt with the decade's most important festival. Now, as 2025 peters out, Greg Prato is also going the oral history route to cover the decade in alternative rock as a whole. You see? Pretty good.
Alternative for the Masses breaks the era down by topic, with chapters covering what led to the "alt-rock revolution"; the genre's subgenres; its major bands, songs, and albums; and the videos and magazines used to promote that music; as well as the matters Pearson, Bienstock, and Beaujo addressed more dedicatedly in their own books. There are also chapters that deal with the issues—the drugs, the death of Kurt Cobain, the major label interference, the flood of poseurs—that ultimately brought the era to an end. Prato's decision to not end Alternative for the Masses with that natural conclusion means the book halts a lot less naturally with some random comment about the soundtrack to that Kids movie.
But that's a pretty minor quibble, because for the majority chunk of Alternative for the Masses, Prato conveys his story in a pretty linear, well-organized way. And, of course, he gets a lot of assistance from his impressive roster of interview subjects, which includes such major artists as Kristin Hersh, Tanya Donnelly, Craig Wedren, Mary Timony, Speech, Les Claypool, Cory Glover, Eddie "King " Roesser, and Frank Black. And if you don't already which bands those people were in, you really do need to read Alternative for the Masses. Hopefully this vital era will continue to get more attention in the new year to come.
