Dad Rock goes back to college, '80s-style
"Alternative rock" may not have been born in the 1980s, but it definitely came of age on dorm-room stereos and low-wattage campus radio stations in that decade.
Coming out of the punk and new wave movements — but with commercial radio mostly the domain of glossy power ballads — bands that strived to push rock forward found willing cohorts in college students. The Bob Marley and Jim Morrison posters didn't necessarily come off the dorm walls, but they were joined by the likes of R.E.M., the Smiths, the Violent Femmes and the Cure.
On this week's episode of Dad Rock, a Paste BN podcast, Patrick Foster and Jim Lenahan go back to school (fitting for this time of year). The co-hosts revisit the music that got them through midterms and finals in the mid- and late '80s.
"When I look at rock history, I always find the '80s to be this weird period where you had these kind of parallel universes," says Lenahan. "The period between the Sex Pistols and Nirvana is where you had mainstream music on one track and then sort-of alternative music on another track. And the people who listened to alternative music were branded sort of a different way."
Join Patrick and Jim on this jangly musical journey back in time.
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