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R.E.M.
R.E.M., formed in Athens, Georgia in 1980, is widely credited as one of the foundational bands of American alternative and college rock, building a devoted following through independent college radio airplay years before the band achieved mainstream commercial success. Guitarist Peter Buck's jangly, arpeggiated guitar style and frontman Michael Stipe's often deliberately mumbled, difficult-to-decipher vocal delivery on the band's early albums gave R.E.M. a distinctive sound that influenced a generation of subsequent alternative and indie rock guitarists and vocalists. The band's 1991 album Out of Time and its hit single "Losing My Religion" marked R.E.M.'s definitive commercial breakthrough into mainstream popularity, a shift that came after more than a decade of steadily building critical acclaim and college radio success without major commercial radio crossover. R.E.M.'s decision to formally disband in 2011, while still commercially and critically viable rather than continuing past a natural creative endpoint, was relatively unusual among major rock acts, and the band's three-decade career bridging college radio's underground scene and full mainstream commercial success established a template that numerous subsequent alternative rock bands have followed.
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Nirvana
Nirvana's 1991 album Nevermind, led by the single "Smells Like Teen Spirit," unexpectedly displaced Michael Jackson's Dangerous from the top of the Billboard 200, a commercial breakthrough that's widely credited with bringing grunge and alternative rock into mainstream American popular music almost overnight. Frontman Kurt Cobain's raw, often deliberately unpolished songwriting and his combination of pop melodic sensibility with punk-influenced aggression gave Nirvana's music a genuinely distinctive sound that record labels and radio programmers had previously assumed wouldn't achieve major commercial success. Cobain's struggles with heroin addiction and depression, chronicled increasingly openly in interviews and lyrics throughout the band's brief mainstream period, culminated in his 1994 suicide at 27, ending Nirvana's active career after barely three years of major mainstream visibility and cementing Cobain's place in music's "27 Club" of prominent musicians who died at that age. Nirvana's brief but massively influential mainstream run fundamentally reshaped the commercial landscape of American rock radio and MTV programming throughout the 1990s, effectively ending the mainstream dominance of the hair metal and glam rock that had preceded it, and the band's influence on subsequent alternative rock remains foundational despite their genuinely brief active career.
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