A few weeks ago during one of my many absent-minded late night walks to Wegmans, an odd question popped into my head: what is the least likely album to ever become a mainstream success? The criteria for this is admittedly vague in multiple areas. We could be talking about albums that were dark or avant-garde that broke onto to the radio, or sold a bunch of copies. We could also be talking about music that's just so damn terrible that you wonder how so many people possibly could have bought it. The idea of "mainstream" is pretty damn vague, too. Are we talking about albums that sold a bunch of copies, but had no radio hits (like recent efforts by The Shins and Arcade Fire), or does there need to be consistent airplay to qualify? This, of course, is the problem with these late-night-walk questions; they rarely contain definitive answers.

Still, after digging around in my head for awhile, I found a few potential answers. the first was Alice In Chains' 1992 masterpiece Dirt, which somehow managed to spawn five radio hits despite being an unrelentingly miserable tale of drug addiction and depression. Yes, it came out at  time when that sort of thing had become quite popular, but still, you'd think there would be a limit. But no, ""Down In A Hole," "Angry Chair," "Rooster," "Them Bones," and "Would?" all crashed the airwaves, and are all still played today. The other answer was the self-titled debut by Rage Against the Machine, although their other three albums could qualify as well. It was so angry and so explicitly political and taking aim at the very forces deciding to play it in the first place that it's place as a successful mainstream rock album continues to flummox me. How could the powers that be accept an album that was so explicitly anti-establishment anyway?

To be honest, I still don't know. I wish I had a definitive answer there, but some things are just flukes. That said, considering the success of Rage Against The Machine med me to further consider what an elastic word "mainstream" was. After all, would Zach de la Rocha or Tom Morello ever consider their work mainstream? It seems unlikely. While with RATM, they rarely made any deliberate attempts to get songs on the radio, it just sort of happened. At the same time, there are other bands who have found themselves in the world of "indie" music who wonder why the radio doesn't embrace songs they think should be a fit for major markets. Just ask the folks in Grizzly Bear, who essentially found an audience as an indie band by accident, since mainstream rock radio was too busy blasting Theory Of  Deadman's new album to notice.

So, mainstream isn't something that happens deliberately. Bands who rebel from the radio can be embraced by it, while bands who try for hits can find success in the Pitchfork-controlled universe. And yet, that term has such strong ties to how we view music today. We create a divide between "mainstream" and "hipster" music that may or may not really exist, but  certainly feels like it does. It' strange, though, because when we consider how random musical success is, very few acts can truly be categorized as mainstream."

fun. were known as an indie band until "We Are Young" was used in a Super Bowl commercial, leading to radio play, leading to it becoming a #1 hit. Then, "Some Nights" stormed the charts too, and they were a mainstream band. People who took pride in listening to the finer things shunned them, while folks who listen to Kiss 98.5 seven days a week suddenly became fans. The quality of the music didn't necessarily matter, so much as who was listening to it, and who it was being made available to.

Music becomes mainstream because the people who determine what mainstream music is choose it to be so. Knowing this, making a conscious decision to avoid anything that may be popular among the part of the population that doesn't care about music all that much is a patently foolish choice. Just because the people who like Nickelback like this other band doesn't mean that the new band is guaranteed to suck. Bands aim for the mainstream and end up hitting somewhere else. Meanwhile, bands can aim as far from it as possible, and still wind up on Active Rock radio stations. It's all random, and it shouldn't have any effect on your listening choices.