Now Alternative Press is Dead

Back in the year 2020, Alternative Press founder Mike Shea sold the best music magazine in the history of the world to MDDN. Never heard of MDDN? It's an incorporated business owned by Benji and Joel Madden, famous for being the founding members of Average Pop/Punk band Good Charlotte.

In 2022, the Maddens' closed the magazine's headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio and moved it to the West Coast. I was so positive that the magazine would die, I crafted its obituary.

Editor's Note: Deep in the bowels of the Beacon of Speech draft section....

But MDDN pulled the magazine out of fire and made a go of it.

Kind of....

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Between 1989 and 2021, Alternative Press Magazine was the best music magazine in America.

When the alternative music wave washed across the country in the early 1990's, it was Alternative Press that was the Bible for teens and young adults that lived the music.

Rolling Stone was for the Old People.

Billboard was too dry.

SPIN was too inconsistently quirky.

Vibe was awesome, if you loved rap.

Kerrang! was really good, if you loved metal.

Maximum Rocknroll was perfect, if you loved obscure, underground punk.

But what was "alternative music?" Was it hardcore? Was it punk? Was it grunge?

Alternative Press had a really good pulse on, at the time, genre-less music that would bubble up from the underground. Some bands were simply rock artists that wore flannel to fit in.

Editor's Note II: Yes, we are looking at Pearl Jam.

Alternative Press covered outliers in all genres.

I remember when Slint's Spiderland came out. Alternative Press championed the hell out of it, calling Spiderland one of the best albums of the 90's. Other publications ignored it. It wasn't marketable, it didn't sound like anything else, it couldn't be categorized. History proved AP right.

On the other end of spectrum, when the Dillinger Escape Plan's Calculating Infinity came out in the late 90's, I remember metal publications didn't know what to do with Infinity for the same reasons as Spiderland, but in the landscape of extreme music. AP treated the Dillinger Escape Plan like musical pioneers.

For a generation, AP took the nebulous term of Alternative seriously, bringing the fringes to the masses.

And, for a brief time, from about 92-94, I could argue that with bands like Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails, AP helped the underground become the mainstream.

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So imagine my surprise when I went to altpress.com today:

Yikes.

No one should be celebrating Good Charlotte.

You say I'm a hater?

Listen, you have to acknowledge a band to be a hater. I forgot that Good Charlotte even existed. I

looked up their biggest hit and listened for a full minute.... Oh yeah, those guys.

What are we celebrating again?

Apparently Good Charlotte is releasing a new album next week called Motel Du Cap, their first studio album in 7 years.

I'm sorry, I just can't get past this....

Good Charlotte?

Man do I feel old.

So I asked AI: Is Alternative Press going bankrupt? All knowing AI had no answer. Then I tried Reddit:

I'm calling my shot, Alternative Press cannot survive putting their own owners on the cover, they just can't. They will fold, or sell for pennies on the dollar, within the year.

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I loved Hunter S. Thompson's writing, but he wasn't my generation's voice. Reading Thomspon's work sometimes reminded me of visiting a museum.

Who was the voice of my generation? I always thought it was Jason Pettigrew at Alternative Press. His passion came through his pen. If he said to listen to something, more times than not I just went out and bought that piece of music.

If you want to support the spirit of Alternative Press today, go out and buy Pettigrew's new book, Ministry: The Land of Rape and Honey.