HERE'S MY PET theory: in the next five years we will see a resurgence of bands influenced by the early '90s pre-grunge alterna-clan. Retro-grebo let's call it – lots of double bass, bongos, keyboards, à la Jesus Jones, Ned's Atomic Dustbin, EMF. It's like rock and rap together again, for the first time. This struck me after digging up a tape that had on it an episode of MTV's 120 Minutes from 1990, hosted by the smarmy British guy, post-Kevin Seal. It was effective to torture my housemates with, but I'd forgotten how bad it really was back then. The alternative to the regular MTV playlist was awash in long hair, acoustic guitars, and really boring tinting effects.

Here's the thing: my pet theory is bullshit. Which is not to say that it won't come to pass – we have been given plenty of bullshit to swallow and have willingly done so. Some chain of decision making once mandated so long ago, let's say pre-grunge, that these really boring bands be foisted on an impressionable young me, guaranteeing a subconscious automatic empathy toward music writers of my generation and musicians seeking the next retro trend to devour. It's like a musical equivalent of The Manchurian Candidate, conditioning a generation of drones through pop music. Call me paranoid, but if this were a vast conspiracy, music journalism would be one of the hydra's heads, setting up false idols for eager minds to gnaw on.

It's already begun: the '80s revival giving way to '90s nostalgia, the snake swallowing its tail faster and faster. Do you still believe in the infallibility of LCD Soundsystem or Vice magazine as your guiding lights? Revisionism lets you bury poor choices, bad haircuts, worse music selections. It will never get as bad as the early '90s again, you hope, you pray – cringing at what the 2005 equivalent of Midnight Oil will be. One of my favorite bands, OutHud, now sounds like Information Society.

There's a nugget of conventional wisdom that's made the rounds and seems to have some bearing on this cultural recycling: we get the leaders we deserve. While this is not really true of "elected" leaders, we may be stuck with the pop stars we deserve, or more accurately, the media we deserve. Even when seeking out alternatives, we get the force feed of corporations seeping into our media diets, be it Clear Channel or Fox News, narrowing the gap between Bill O'Reilly and Ludacris as pop dignitaries.

There are exceptions: groups like the Independent Media Center (www.indymedia.org) attempt to democratize the playing field and forge words into weapons, with varying degrees of success. For every Indymedia, however, there is a Pitchfork (www.pitchforkmedia.com). For the uninitiated, Pitchfork is the unnecessarily snide font of music geek datastream that even the avowed hater feels obliged to monitor. The reviews and the news section are fond of gimmicky asides, numeric ratings, painful attempts at humor, and charting correlations between artists' popularity and relevance.

Pitchfork assumes its audience to be the sort of hivemind indie rock nation that one would think had withered away – let's say Matador's 10-year anniversary. It's an admirable microcosm of what indie rock, the 1990s beast child, has taught us – that the underground is a bad business model and seriously, when you near 30, it's time to stop fucking around and start making some money. If you're a musician, that means writing songs about "adult subjects." One of the videos on the 120 Minutes tape was Adrian Belew rationalizing his lack of success to his daughter, the achingly literal "O Daddy." If you are a music writer who has stopped caring about the community that got you interested in music, this means turning your jaded gaze on the perpetual-motion machine of arbitrary hype. It's no surprise then that antihype begets more hype, and the contrary-to-be-contrary writer is hoisted on his or her own petard. Example: if you hadn't heard of Pitchfork, you're likely to check it out now just to see what I'm going on about – irony plus.

Don't get me wrong – I'm not deluded enough to believe Pitchfork has the power or demonic will of Rupert Murdoch. It's more disturbing to me to see media that is ostensibly underground and independent aping the mainstream, rewriting indie rock as Entertainment Tonight. There are a few good, maybe great, writers in the mix, and the lengthier features and interviews are usually well done. Most of the writing smacks of youth and its attendant failure to reference anything beyond its scope. Its cynicism feels unearned. In another vestige of 1990, Whit Stillman's Metropolitan, the main character admits he doesn't read books anymore, only book reviews that keep him apprised of the literary consensus. This scene kept popping into my head the last few years as a metaphor for music journalism, but maybe it's just how everyone young and impressionable behaves, herding around what would have been the water cooler if any of them still had jobs.