alternative music started emerging in the 1970s and 1980s, when punk rock bands, signed to independent record labels, began to play new styles of music - alternative styles began to grow in prominence during the 1980s, and then really gaining much wider popularity during the 1990s, with bands such as nirvana and r. e. m.

not one to ignore musical movements, brazil began to adopt alternative styles in a similar time period, as the country already had a steady base of rock music, which had existed since the 1960s - originally more popular in săo paulo, it was rockstar raul seixas who was one of the first pioneers to move rock music to rio.