I think it's cyclical. Punk in the early 80s was a reaction to the excesses of 70s superbands (e.g. Johnny Rotten's "I hate Pink Floyd" t-shirt). Then things built up again to "monsters of rock" arena tours, The Spice Girls, and hair bands before getting torn down again by the likes of Nirvana.
(Hell, rock and roll was born as an anti-establishment thing in the 1950s)
Maybe we're just due for another one of the inflection points where being anti-cool will become cool again.
Ok, the Spice Girls were formed 1994, the same year Kurt Cobain died, but Take That and lots of other boy/girl bands and other extremely commercial pop acts were contemporary with Nirvana and the whole grunge phenomenon. So it's not cyclical, it's actually two sides of the same medal. There are to this day still lots of bands that hold their "indie ethos" high, the only thing different in the 1990s was that some of those indie/alternative bands were actually successful enough to be considered (shudder) mainstream...
> There are to this day still lots of bands that hold their "indie ethos" high, the only thing different in the 1990s was that some of those indie/alternative bands were actually successful enough to be considered (shudder) mainstream...
The late 80s to early 2000s was a distribution sweet-spot for groups like that.
Early MTV didn't always line up with what mainstream radio played, but gave more new artists opportunities. This continued up at least through Eminem getting his breakout in that way - I wouldn't say he shunned fame, but until breaking through with a music video there the radio machine wasn't giving him that fame. Tapes, and later CD burners, also massively accelerated word-of-mouth for stuff that wasn't the immediate first choice for top-40 format radio stations because it let more people share more things. Then you had the internet/napster era supercharge that. "It Wasn't Me" by Shaggy became a huge hit because a local DJ in Hawaii found it on Napster and started playing it.
Now we've crossed a tipping point where there's more indie stuff available than ever, but also so much personalized listening where it's getting harder again to get Nirvana-level famous outside of the system. But a Chappel Roan still fits the bill pretty well. Did you have lesbian dance-pop with 80s camp on your bingo card for massive mainstream popularity a few years ago?