alt Hacker NewsI think it's cyclical. Punk in the early 80s was a reaction to the excesses of 70s superbands (e.g. Johnny Rotten's "I hate Pink Floyd" t-shirt). Then things built up again to "monsters of rock" arena tours, The Spice Girls, and hair bands before getting torn down again by the likes of Nirvana.
(Hell, rock and roll was born as an anti-establishment thing in the 1950s)
Maybe we're just due for another one of the inflection points where being anti-cool will become cool again.
Ok, the Spice Girls were formed 1994, the same year Kurt Cobain died, but Take That and lots of other boy/girl bands and other extremely commercial pop acts were contemporary with Nirvana and the whole grunge phenomenon. So it's not cyclical, it's actually two sides of the same medal. There are to this day still lots of bands that hold their "indie ethos" high, the only thing different in the 1990s was that some of those indie/alternative bands were actually successful enough to be considered (shudder) mainstream...