I grew up in a faith that talks about the one true church. So it's not surprising that when I found alternative music, I didn't just find a genre I liked. I found the one true genre. For a lot of us raised Latter-day Saint in the 80s and 90s, alternative music arrived the way the gospel is supposed to arrive: as a discovery, a recognition, a sense that something real had been hidden in plain sight while everyone else was listening to the radio. Once you heard it, Top 40 sounded like what it was. Calculated. Market-tested. Eager to please. The Cure and Depeche Mode and the Smiths didn't sound like they were trying to please anybody. They sounded like they'd been given something and had to say it. We already had the vocabulary for that. Testimony. Revelation. Conversion. The difference between a man who teaches and a man who has seen. It didn't take much for that language to drift from Sunday into the stereo.
How I got here
I didn't come to this music in Utah. I came to it in the mission field as an adopted kid in a convert family that was a little odd even by the standards of the local ward. Outsider was already my native language.
The church that actually converted me was a Hastings record store run by two roommates, one obsessed with pop and the other with David Bowie, who let a handful of us hang out at their place. There was also Club Elite - Saturday nights spent dancing to Nitzer Ebb, Front 242, A Split - Second, New Order, Book of Love. That music came to a military town by way of families who'd been stationed in Germany and brought the imports home. Friends would go out of town and record midnight shows dedicated to EBM and New Beat and bring back their pearls of great price. The Galleria in Rexburg, Idaho, was my church away from church. 120 Minutes my general conference.
Then a mission in Montreal, where music came in sideways, through local ward members and chance radio. Songs of Faith and Devotion, New Order's "Regret," and even Ministry from a passing car. It held me together more than I would have admitted at the time.
Then a final move to Utah, where KJQ and then X96 had made alternative music something like a shared civic religion. After the 1980s, grunge and post-grunge were a letdown but I understood what it meant to the kids who'd grown up on it. It gave LDS teenagers an identity that wasn't mainstream and didn't require them to leave home, family, or church to have it.
The prophets
Every true church needs founders, and ours had them. Not in the sense that they were good peopleû (some of them very much weren't), but in the role they played. They seemed to have found something that hadn't existed before. They had a vision, and the records were the evidence.
David Bowie was the progenitor, the one who showed everyone else that you could keep reinventing yourself and the reinvention could be the art. He gave a few generations of weird kids permission to be strange, ambitious, and curious all at once. No Bowie, no Bauhaus...
Ian Curtis was the witness, someone transmitting from a place ordinary language couldn't reach. Joy Division doesn't just sound dark. It sounds like something being exposed.
Robert Smith was the poet who built an entire emotional climate and invited you to live in it. Disintegration doesn't describe sadness so much as furnish it.
Martin Gore was the theologian. Guilt, devotion, desire, blasphemy, all set to synthesizers and somehow danceable. "Blasphemous Rumours" and "Personal Jesus" sound like a man arguing with God in a nightclub, which for a Mormon kid was an almost unbearably relevant genre.
Morrissey was the prophet of alienation: funny, cruel, sentimental, ridiculous, and right often enough to be dangerous. Even his absurd pronouncements arrived with total conviction. (We have some experience with that.) Johnny Marr proved sophistication didn't need showing off. Interlocking parts, odd voicings, all of it in service of the song.
The high priestesses
Any version of this story that's only about men gets it wrong, and the church I grew up in has enough of that already.
Siouxsie Sioux didn't find a place in the alternative world. She built one, with an aesthetic and a congregation of outsiders to go with it. Kate Bush proved that pop could be literary, theatrical, strange, and still sell, that accessibility and ambition were never enemies. Elizabeth Fraser communicated without words you could parse, and it didn't matter; you understood her anyway. If that isn't speaking in tongues, I don't know what is. Cosey Fanni Tutti pushed past the edge of what music was supposed to be. If Kate Bush showed how far pop could stretch, Cosey showed you could leave the building. Kristin Hersh followed an interior vision so uncompromising it sounded discovered rather than written. Bjork and Margrét Örnólfsdóttir, Lisa Gerrard, Kim Deal, Tanya Donelly, Heidi Berry, Harriet Wheeler, Rachel Goswell, Tina Weymouth, Annabella Lwin, Miki Berenyi, Emma Anderson, Deirdre and Louise Rutkowski, Toni Halliday, Hope Sandoval, Debora Iyall, Jade Starling and Gillian Gilbert all deserve mentions and so many more...
These women weren't female versions of male rock stars. They were their own authorities. For a kid raised in a tradition where every recognized voice of revelation was a man, that wasn't a small thing, even if I didn't have words for it yet.
Orthodoxy, of course
And like every conversion, this one came with certainty, and certainty came with snobbery.
There were correct bands and incorrect bands. In my circles, Psychic TV and the Chainsaw Kittens were the credibility markers; Erasure and Jesus Jones were embarrassing. Looking back, some of the contempt for Erasure was plain homophobia wearing a critic's clothes. Depeche Mode and The Cure, meanwhile, was treated as the entry-level alternative band, the ones you were supposed to outgrow. There were levels of righteousness, and the deeper you went into noise or hardcore or industrial, the holier you were supposed to be.
I never fully bought that doctrine. Difficulty is not the same as depth. Abrasion isn't proof of seriousness. The hardest thing, and the most impressive, is to make music that's original, emotionally true, and something people actually want to hear again. Marr did it. Gore did it. Smith and Bush did it. Even Skinny Puppy and Front 242, about as dark and dense as anything I loved, never forgot the rhythm. They expanded what pop could be without abandoning the listener.
The point was never to make music inaccessible. It was to make accessible music that hadn't been made stupid.
Authenticity as a spiritual value
Here's where I think the Mormon part actually matters.
We're raised to believe truth is something you seek, recognize, and come to know personally, not just accept. That posture doesn't switch off when you put on headphones. A lot of us weren't content to enjoy a song. We wanted to believe in it.
Alternative music was built for that kind of investment. It sold itself as the alternative to manufactured culture, and the anti-sellout ethic gave artistic integrity a moral weight. The ideal artist kept faith with the vision even when it cost them, which is to say the ideal artist was a kind of martyr, and their catalog a kind of testimony.
Of course it was an industry too. Plenty of uncompromising artists had very good record deals. But that didn't break the spell, because we weren't really responding to the purity of the business. We were responding to whether the music sounded like it had a reason to exist.
What it was actually about
I don't think alternative music was ever really a rebellion against the church for most of us. I think it was the same hunger pointed somewhere else: the desire for something sincere, something from a deeper place, something that recognized us.
The church gave me a vocabulary for meaning. Alternative music gave me room for the things that vocabulary didn't have much space for: doubt, sadness, desire, irony, contradiction. It didn't offer answers. It offered recognition. Someone else had felt this, and had made something beautiful out of it.
That's not a replacement for faith. But it lives in the same neighborhood. These days I'd call it something closer to hopimony than testimony: not a declaration that something is true, but an honest orientation toward something that feels true, with no guarantee attached.
So yes. We found our prophets, our scriptures, our one true music. And naturally, we were sure everyone else was listening to the wrong station.
Worlds without end, I'm still a little sure of it.
