Hello and welcome to my blog: Girls Talk: Alternative Music. My name is Sydney Waldron and I am one of three Editor-in-chiefs for the Dart this year! I am obsessed with alternative music and so happy to have this blog to share with you my journey through alternative music and little bits of history from each band and generation. 

My taste and love for alternative music really exploded my freshman year of high school.  Before that most of my music came from the radio and my parents.  My freshman year I discovered the beauty of a Spotify account.

I am so incredibly lucky and blessed to be in the generation of streaming music. My parents have told me horror stories of buying CDs and individual purchases of songs and it’s hard to believe the amount of money people had to spend just to play music.

I am also thankful for streaming because it has allowed my generation and me to explore an array of music genres and decades that before we may have had limited access to.

This Library of Alexandria for music allowed my freshman year self to discover the genre of 90s grunge. I originally started playing Nirvana because I had heard it so much from being in my Dad’s car. After this, I listened pretty obsessively to the Big Four Grunge bands. 

After I had exhausted that, I found the life changing genre of 80s new wave. This is my most listened to time period and this is where a lot of my blog will be focused on. I love the melancholy vibes of The Smiths, Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees. These bands are to this day my favorite and most listened to bands. 

The end of my junior year and summer before senior year I started listening to the more rough and angsty bands of the 70s movement, where the 80s new wave movement got its roots. Some of my favorites being: the Ramones, the Sex Pistols and of course the Clash. 

I then noticed that in my music listening, besides Taylor Swift, I had an alarming obscene number of women in my playlists. So I started exploring some post-punk female bands and discovered some of the best, most underrated bands. I first started out with some 70s and 80s post punk bands like the: Go-Gos, The Runaways,  The Slits and B-52s. While listening to these awesome bands I became more curious about the history of the punk movement and where females fell into place. This launched an obsessive phase behind the music documentaries both for female bands and any other bands I have listened to. 

After watching all these movies and documentaries, I have obtained many thoughts and emotions about the history of alternative music. The thing that surprised me most is the way that the bands and the different movements use each other as building blocks layering- taking inspiration from what has been done, while also improving on and defining it.  This blog will focus on many bands that have defined alternative music.  

I want to apologize in advance to the music lovers of the 60s. I would also like to formally apologize to my father who found out the hard way that his love for the Rolling Stones was not hereditary. I know how important this decade was to the development of music, especially alternative music  but I have just never been able to get into it. Therefore, this blog will go in chronological order starting with the 70s punk movement. I hope you enjoy reading!