Alternative Mainstream
Making Choices in Pop Music

- The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude
- Spaces for Criticism
- Interrupting the City
- Imaginative Bodies
- The Practice of Dramaturgy
- Mobile Autonomy
- In-between Dance Cultures
- No Culture, No Europe
- Arts Education Beyond Art
- Aesthetic Justice
- Alternative Mainstream
- The Ethics of Art
- Institutional Attitudes
- Teaching Art in the Neoliberal Realm
- Community Art
- Moving Together
- Repressief Liberalisme
- The Art of Civil Action - Political Space and Cultural Dissent
- Commonism - A New Aesthetics of the Real
- The Future of the New
- Contemporary Artist Residencies: Reclaiming Time and Space
- When Fact is Fiction – Documentary Art in the Post-Truth Era
- Design Dedication
- Nearness - Art And Education After Covid-19
- Nabijheid - Kunst en onderwijs na Covid-19
- The Aesthetics of Ambiguity
- Kwetsbaarheid
- Fragility
- Sensing Earth - Cultural Quests Across a Heated Globe
Published by Valiz/Antennae Series
By Gert Keunen.
Published in Valiz's Antennae series, Gert Keunen's Alternative Mainstream explores the music that lies between the "mainstream" and the "underground"—an apparently diverse intermediate zone that includes genres ranging from hip hop to rock, from folk to electronic music. What kind of decision-making lies at the basis of the selections made by people working in the pop music circuit? Which general frames of thinking and evaluating do music professionals apply? Why do some bands and not others get ample airplay, concert bookings, press coverage and, as a result, cross over into this "alternative mainstream"? Author Gert Keunen, a Belgian publicist, musician and professor of music history, attempts to uncover what aesthetics and ideologies—and what broader social and economic factors—underscore the construction of the alternative mainstream, exploring the systems at work beneath the processes of decision-making and selection in popular music.