When did Grunge become Grunge...
(Continued from last month by RICK MARTIN)
"We have a pretty big role in spreading something from the underground to the heartland," said John Canelli, the senior vice president of music and talent at MTV. But a band playing the heartland isn't underground anymore, which explains why, Mr. Canelli said, "we're always looking for whatever the next thing is."
MTV embodies the paradox of selling a phenomenon like grunge. When an alternative movement goes mainstream, it relinquishes its alternative credentials.
"You cross over to the point where you lose the original following," said Jay Coleman, the president and chief executive of Marketing and Communications International in New York. "But you pick up 10 times the original audience." Mr. Coleman's company marketed an alternative-music compact disk, "Stolar Tracks" (available from a "900" number), for Stolichnaya vodka, starring, among other artists, Seattle's Screaming Trees. He offered to arrange corporate sponsorship for the organizers of the second Lollapalooza tour, held last summer, but was turned down on the grounds that it would be like "sponsoring Woodstock."