I picked up a few years worth of Rolling Stone from the late 1970s which chronicle dissatisfaction with Rock as a genre. It started out with classically trained musicians who went into directions such as progressive rock and arena rock that eventually drifted away from critics and audiences.
You got a new generation of people who learned to strum the guitar because they liked rock music and they gave us punk and other simplifications of rock. Punk had no commercial potential and thus gave rise to post-punk and new wave which, after a few years that everybody (even Barry Manilow) had to make disco records if they wanted to get play, had a backlash. First synths became a "new sound" (even Neil Young!) but soon they became mandatory as they were the basis for "music word processors" and once the old musicians switched to them people quit caring about their new albums.
Alternative came out in the 1980s as a reaction to that whole mess.
You got a new generation of people who learned to strum the guitar because they liked rock music and they gave us punk and other simplifications of rock. Punk had no commercial potential and thus gave rise to post-punk and new wave which, after a few years that everybody (even Barry Manilow) had to make disco records if they wanted to get play, had a backlash. First synths became a "new sound" (even Neil Young!) but soon they became mandatory as they were the basis for "music word processors" and once the old musicians switched to them people quit caring about their new albums.
Alternative came out in the 1980s as a reaction to that whole mess.