I kind of expected this to happen. It happened before: British punk with the beginning of Thatcher's Eighties turned to the most insipid recent European music form - Euro-pop and Euro-trash, which in a later reaction prompted band names like KMFDM. Therefore, I somehow suspected that punk, that finally caught the mainstream in the U.S. with the Seattle "grunge" scene, would turn to pudding soon in America, too.
At about the same pace as with the punk in Europe. Of course punk, hard-core, industrial, "alternative", they will always be around, they were around before: there were punk and "grunge" bands all the way through eighties. Actually, Nirvana was playing many years before the Teen Spirit MTV video was aired. Soundgarden, that ominously decided to quit playing on the anniversary of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain shooting himself up in his head, was, radio said on that day, around as a band for full 12 years. It is just that it will not be the mainstream any more.
At first nobody cares about you, then they say you are a celebrity and give you a million bucks, then again nobody cares. It's all just business. The profit is the motive: no politics is involved. Why else would TIME magazine declare NIN's Trent Raznor one of 25 most influential people in America 1997 (he shares the spread with Robert Rubin, Secretary of the Treasury)? Take your money and enjoy the early retirement. Everybody gets his or hers fifteen minutes sometimes and then it is over. Actually - not everybody gets it - most of artists never get their break.
For some years to
come, however, "alternative rock" stations will continue to
play "the grunge greatest hits" from Nirvana, Pearl Jam,
Soundgarden, Bush and the neo-punk from Greenday,
Rancid, Offspring, etc. With time they will however be
replaced by bands which names I would not mention,
because I don't know them (yet I hear them more and more
often on the so-called "alternative rock" radio stations). Most
of the "old-school grunge" already turned to its hard-rock
heavy metal roots, and bands like Rancid are less often
played than classics like Ramones. Offspring may or may not sell its old touring van (now that they tour in buses). Nirvana, probably, won't. It is slowly sinking in the muddy banks of Vilappa hills. Welcome to the brighter
part of nineties, when the "new alternative" will again have to
be imported in the U.S. (like Prodigy).
Good that God (or
maybe it wasn't God, exactly) gave us Nine Inch Nails. Would
it be different if Kurt lived these 3 more years? Would it be
better if it would be different? Long time ago Plato noticed
that the change in the popular music precedes changes in
society mores, but today there are many different popular
music forms and many different sub-societies living side by
side, to the point that terms mainstream and alternative may
soon become at best dubious, at worst obsolete - 
if politics does not intervene: banning of Marilyn Manson performances in Virginia, Maryland and New Jersey may start a new trend in alternative. A trend I am exquisitly familiar with:
ten years ago Slovenian band Laibach was banned in most of former Yugoslav Republics. Today, there is no more Yugoslavia, and Laibach is the only former Yugoslav band that sells records in the U.S., and that can play in any new country that emerged from former Yugoslavia. In ten years, who knows what would be of Marylin and what of Maryland.
It is never a good idea to ban popular music in times of economic crisis, particularly that popular music which is associated with the social group mostly affected by the crisis. By the way - check here for the anecdotal connection of the grunge to former Yugoslavia, particularly Croatia.
