Greg Prato has written somewhere around 40 books, all about music. His latest look through music history is all about the 90’s alt-rock explosion called Alternative For The Masses: The 90s Alt-Rock Revolution – An Oral History, and it is out now. Features new and old interviews with some of the biggest and most important names from the 90s.
“Yeah, about two months. Yeah. Two months, two months, 2 or 3 months. We had, Red Hot Chili Peppers, blood sugar, sex, magic, Metallica, Black Album, Guns and Roses, Use Your Illusion, Pearl Jam Ten, Soundgarden, Superunknown and then also in the summer was right when Alice in Chains’ Facelift hit like it had been out for a while. And there was something it was almost like I remember first, the first time I saw the Smashing Pumpkins video for the song Siva, it was like there was something special about seeing it late at night. You’re the only person awake in your house, and it was almost like a hallucinogenic video. So it was like a very trippy, psychedelic thing that really you can’t create nowadays.”
About Alternative For the Masses: No period in the history of rock music offered such an abrupt shift in prevailing tastes as the 1990s. While just a short while before, radio and MTV were clamoring for hair metal bands, suddenly alt-rockers such as Jane’s Addiction, Nine Inch Nails, Faith No More, Primus, Smashing Pumpkins, and of course, Nirvana, brought a sea change not just in what the most popular bands sounded like, but also in fashion, politics, and seemingly all aspects of pop culture.
In Alternative for the Masses: The Oral History of the ’90s Alt-Rock Revolution, veteran music critic Greg Prato presents more than 60 new interviews conducted exclusively for the book—with an emphasis on the 1990–1995 peak period
