Politics & Power Quote by Thurston Moore

Moore is poking at the way American radio turns a word like "Alternative" into a neat retail category, then acts shocked when the product doesn’t fit on the shelf. The complaint isn’t just that Sonic Youth won’t sit comfortably between Blink-182 and The Offspring; it’s that the industry has flattened decades of aesthetic rebellion into a single, youth-marketed format. In the U.S., “alternative” became a radio lane with strict tempo, tone, and demographic expectations: upbeat, hooky, cleanly produced, vaguely transgressive but ultimately harmless. Moore’s band helped invent an earlier alternative grammar - art-school noise, downtown experimentation, long arcs of influence from no wave and punk into something colder, stranger, less eager to please.

The line “We’re hardly of that generation” is the knife twist. He’s rejecting the lazy lineage that treats all non-mainstream guitar music as one continuous teen-facing movement. Blink and Offspring are post-Nirvana beneficiaries of an alt economy; Sonic Youth are closer to the infrastructure that made that economy possible, coming up in scenes where obscurity wasn’t a branding problem, it was the point. There’s also a subtle jab at American cultural memory: radio’s habit of compressing history so it can sell it back as a lifestyle.

Moore’s tone is weary, not precious. He’s not begging for spins; he’s defending distinctions that matter to musicians, even if they’re inconvenient to programmers. The subtext: if “alternative” can mean anything, it ends up meaning nothing - and the weirdos who built the word get erased by the playlist.