"In the 1990s, a great deal of music which had been considered underground, punk, or just plain weird in the 1980s could suddenly be found in the mainstream; playing on commercial television, on the radio, in shopping centres and sporting arenas. By the decade’s end, alternative music was both triumphant and meaningless. Its stars played to massive crowds and its music was used to sell cars on television. It had integrated itself completely into the media spectacle, and could no longer reasonably claim to be offering an alternative to it. At the time, this was cause for both celebration and despair -- and from our current vantage point, both reactions might seem a little over-the-top. We may choose to see the alt-rock crossover as just another turn of pop culture’s eternal cycle, its artists subject to rock-and-roll’s most basic physical law—what comes up, must sell out. [...] On the one hand, this gave rise to a resilient and resourceful underground, and on the other, to a hunger for pop justice, for a future world where good music could be popular, and popular music could be good. Thus, when underground music finally broke through to the mainstream in 1991, the event was either denounced as a gigantic sellout or celebrated as a revolution, sometimes both at the same time. It was an intellectual balancing act that could only pulled off with the help of that staple of ‘90s pop life—postmodern irony."