Guitar Anthems of the '90s

Everything changed the second "Smells Like Teen Spirit" infiltrated the airwaves, twisting Kurt Cobain's love of the Pixies' explosive quiet/loud dynamic into a bloodthirsty battle cry for Generation X. Like it or not, the band immediately became a benchmark for the grunge scene that had sprung up in Nirvana's launching-pad city of Seattle — a cranky combination of heavy metal, hardcore punk, and indie rock, as heard in the canvas-splattering guitar solos of "Alive"; the wobbly, wave-pool riff of "Rusty Cage" (later covered by Johnny Cash); and the anxious, Cujo-unleashed atmospherics of "Bullet with Butterfly Wings."

As for what was going on outside of grunge, the cult of Cobain also gave way to the many sides of alternative rock represented in our Next Steps.

Welcome to one of the only times you'll ever see Phish (the freewheeling flare-ups of "Down with Disease") on the same playlist as Godsmack (the chopping block hooks of "Whatever"). That's because the alternative rock movement raised its radio-storming umbrella over everything from the Category 5 chords and brain-battering drums of Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, and Filter to the snot-rocket riffs of pop-punk (Rancid, Blink-182) and bowel-rumbling seven-strings of nü-metal (Slipknot, Powerman 5000, Deftones).

Looking for an alternative to, well, the alternative? Our Deep Cuts raise the curtain on enough noise/shoegaze/stoner-pop anthems to keep your speakers busy in between bits of Static-X and Sepultura.

Wanna know how open-minded modern rock was during the '90s? Aside from welcoming the frenzied synth pop of acid freaks ("Pepper," the sudden breakthrough of the Butthole Surfers after more than a decade of terrifying audiences with skin-boiling pyrotechnics and mildly insane psych-rock), the alternative nation era ushered in the distorted dementia of Unsane, the groove-locked thrash of Sepultura, the pre-High on Fire haze of Sleep, the foundation-forming grunge of Mudhoney (covered by Sonic Youth as part of a split single), the four-track-glorifying indie rock of Guided by Voices, and those monstrous godfathers of metalgaze music (Isis, Cult of Luna), Neurosis.

As the media and self-anointed "slackers" christened Generation X at the start of the '90s, hair-metal and new wave acts all but disappeared in favor of an alternative nation that elected Kurt Cobain to office. Self-loathing and scathing riffs were so prominent post-"Smells Like Teen Spirit" that Time magazine printed a 1993 cover story with the headline "All the Rage: Angry young rockers like Pearl Jam give voice to the passions and fears of a generation." The twist was just how different all this huffing and puffing sounded. Spin your radio dial to a rock station at any given hour and you could hear everything from the spacey Britpop of "Champagne Supernova" to the P-funk punk of "S**k My Kiss," with traces of B-movie metal ("More Human Than Human"), rap-rock ("Bring the Noise," "Epic"), and grunge, glorious grunge (Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots) somewhere in between.