Grow up and admit it. Alternative music is that tragic but invevitable, last-gasp, feeble attempt to stay connected to the thing that mattered. They haven't let go and moved on. In the near future Alternative will finish dying its dull, gray death. Pop music will shrug off the decaying yoke of Rock and go in search of itself.
Contemporary theater is as dead as alternative music.
You see, theater suffers from a similiar affliction. The environmental theater of The Performance Group and the true audience participation events of The Living Theater did not just stretch, but actually broke the boundaries of theater, of art. They were brilliant, bold, and too scary for society to accept. Rather than becoming assimilated into the mainstream, as was rock and roll, the experimental theater of the sixties was driven right back into the womb from which it had issued. Theater artists, though, are aware that it happened.