Originally posted by HockeyHorror
QUESTION!you guyz all know that there is Mainstream hip hop and Underground hip hop
but what do u call that for rock music or punk music? etc etc?
Little more complicated than hip hop... Now, you could go on forever splitting hairs and dividing every band into its own sub-genre. Simply put, you have pop rock, metal, punk, and bands that don't fit into any of those. There are also sell-outs, and bands that have not "sold out". A lot of pop rock and bands that claim to be punk have sold out (ie New Found Glory, Good Charlotte, Simple Plan). However, there are also pop rock bands that have not sold out (ie Green Day, Offspring, IMO blink-182 though you could argue that they have). (I realize that all the names of bands probably mean nothing to you since you don't listen to this stuff anyways) Then there is what I guess is the underground of punk--bands that are not played on the radio or TV or anything. Metal occupies the gray space between "underground" and "mainstream", generally speaking. Some is played on the radio, some isn't.
Probably the main difference between hip hop and rock when it comes to this is that it's a finer line. There are some mainstream bands that make good music.
A+ Barfolomew 😖mart:
Another major difference between underground hip-hop and underground rock/metal is that underground hip-hop is intentionally written to counterbalance all the crap radio rap that gets aired, so aside from pirate stations and the occasional insightful DJ, underground hip-hop is deliberately kept separate from the mainstream (or so I believe). But with rock music, a band could be underground simply because they haven't produced anything which has caught the public's attention. A prime example is Korn. When they released their debut album ten years ago, no one knew them, and they weren't ever on radio or TV. They kept themselves afloat thanks to their large underground fanbase, and eventually released a song which caught the medias attention (ADIDAS), and since then they have become one of the most popular bands in mainstream metal.
So really, for rock music, mainstream is basically the term used for bands that have become well known because of the quality and/or popularity of their music, so quite often you'll find the best stuff is the mainstream stuff (at least for some sub-genres), whereas in hip-hop, mainstream has become a byword for 'total shit'.