Originally Posted by Janszoon

That's not what I mean. I'm saying that the term itself is meaningless since it doesn't actually describe a single genre of music that has any unifying stylistic traits. I mean we can agree that Radiohead and RHCP really aren't the same type of music, right? The only meaning it ever had that made any sense was that it was the alternative to mainstream music, but once it got so popular even that meaning didn't make any sense any more.