Pre-Nirvana hipster-geezer rock

[Kacey Y]

Counterpoint: is music now doomed to collapse into its own anus because people get fed playlists and clusters of genres based on their "preferences", as opposed to the good old days when you actually had to take a gamble on records when you bought them or actively listened to some obscure radio show?

I listen to random stuff on Spotify all the time. Especially if I'm putting on music for the office, which forces me to listen to things I never would normally. I'll just go explore the genre tags and listen to random playlists sometimes. Honestly I get a lot more variety that way than I would with the radio. My experience with everything but college radio stations (which we had none of in my home town when I was a kid), it's just the same playlist every day/half day anyway.

[lost in music]

But maybe some crossover of more mainstream-friendly punk like the Ramones, commercially successful post-punk and coat-trails ('Heads, Blondie, Pretenders, Elvis Costello, Police, and U2)

Yeah, we had some of this stuff too. But for the classics of these bands, they mostly sounded kinda fresh still then, compared to what was happening on classic rock or casey kasem top 40 radio.

The first time I tuned into our local modern rock station (if I recall correctly, they may have even referred to themselves "progressive" but had nothing to do with Yes or Rush or ELP), I got a block that consisted of Black Flag Rise Above, The Ramones Eat That Rat, Siouxsie and the Banshees Peekaboo, topped off with a cover of Helter Skelter by Mighty Sphincter. All at 4:30 in the afternoon before going into the baseball report. That was 88 or 89 and was the wildest it ever got. All the chart modern rock stuff they stuck to after that was exciting to me too, but never quite as exciting as coming home on a rainy day after school in elementary school and discovering Black Flag and the Ramones on the radio and later that night at the dinner table asking my mom and dad what was a sphincter. I didn't hear them play the Ramones again until the mid-90s or so and at that point it was a token spin of Blitzkrieg Bop or Sheena every afternoon, not deep cut Dee Dee songs.

[lost in music]

Maybe 94 or 95 a friend and I called up their request line to get them to play some Black Flag, and the guy kinda sighed and said "I'd love to play some Black Flag, but that's not really how it works anymore."

[lost in music]

Here's the Billboard modern rock chart from the week before Nirvana showed up on it.

http://www.billboard.com/charts/alterna ... 1991-09-14

Had no idea that Massive Attack were already out by that point. Some additions to the "pre-aged hipster" classification like Crowded House and Smithereens. But what stood out to me was David Bowie's Tin Machine probably qualifies for hipster-geezer status as outlined by the OP.

[Gone Fission]

I cannot be sure whether WNEW was pro-Tin Machine or not. Seems like they should have been into it, but Reeves might have been a few tics too modern for them, especially with the constant harmonizer use.

"Progressive radio" as a format had only tangential connection to progressive rock. It was pretty much a continuation of early "free form" FM, which really was pretty descriptive--anything goes with no strict genre boundaries, no fixed playlists, lots of deep cuts, non-hits, etc. Progressive was basically the mildly more commercial version of free form without going full AOR. I basically grew up with pretty good AOR with progressive tinges. I envy your real progressive radio from when you had it.