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.

This weekend was the first weekend of Coachella, the ridiculously popular music festival that takes place in California every April. Besides being quite jealous of all the people who actually got to attend this massive party, when looking at the lineup, I noticed something - you had very few bands that would qualify as "mainstream." Other than the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who closed out the opening weekend last night, the number of bands that get played on the radio was pretty slim. Phoenix - Saturday's closer - had a crossover hit with "1901," but they still aren't exactly the sort of band that gets eaten up by the masses.

The festival was a haven for indie rock fans (assuming the Chili Peppers don't bother them too much), but the bands that supposedly make up "mainstream" rock were just about absent from the proceedings. This begs a question - does anyone know what mainstream rock music really is, or whether or not it really exists anymore. If we were to believe the Billboard charts, or perhaps the opinions who claim to hate anything mainstream, it might be represented by the sort of bands you'd hear on radio stations like The Edge - bands like Shinedown, Theory of A Deadman, and everyone's favorite scapegoat, Nickelback.

But if the notion of mainstream is defined solely by popularity, are any of these bands really all that big? Would any of them be viable as a closing act at a festival like Coachella? Probably not. of course, that's partially because the people who attend Coachella tend to be the same type of people who hate this sort of music. But suppose there were a music festival specifically aimed at fans of so-called Active Rock? Would in draw in the numbers of something like Coachella or Bonnarroo? I doubt it.

The music we refer to as mainstream rock exists on an island - it has almost no crossover fans. You have the people who listen to this music every day, and have no idea what everyone else is talking about when they blast it for it's lack of originality, or uncreative lyrics, and you have the rest of the music world, who wouldn't touch those bands with a 39 and a half foot pole. It's not like this with many other genres. There's a relatively equal number of dedicated hip-hop fans, and people who casually enjoy mainstream rap artists. Same goes for pop and R&B. Even country,long known as a "niche" genre likely has more casual fans than mainstream rock - you'd probably find more casual fans of Blake Shelton and Luke Bryan than you would for Breaking Benjamin or Buckcherry.

So, does this mean indie is the new mainstream? Well, maybe a little, but keep in mind, very few of these bands have hits. Once in awhile you get a fluke like fun., who had two smashes out of nowhere. or you get a band like Mumford & Sons that began life as an allegedly "indie" band before capturing the hearts of the masses at a rather alarming rate. That's the confusing thing - the bands that get played on the radio aren't popular outside of the radio, the bands that have larger followings don't get any airplay. It's left us in an era where rock has no identity, no flagship bands or sounds. It's no-mans-land right now.

There are few rock acts that I would count as being truly "mainstream.". The Chili Peppers would be one, Foo Fighters would be another, then Green Day, U2 as the elder statesmen, and finally, the Black Keys, since they're just about the only band I can think of that has radio hits and an indie following (even if that following began to evaporate the second they started having radio hits). This isn't necessarily a good or bad thing, it's just worth noting - the term "mainstream" rock tends to be used as a strawman, to describe the dull, unentertaining music swallowed by the masses, but lately that music's following is dwindling rapidly, to the point where it's nothing more than a niche.