Babyboomers who've wandered in musical exile for the last 25 years are flocking to alternative and punk rock bands like "self" -- and they're not alone. This new breed of rock band currently holds four of the top ten slots on MTV's video Countdown. In his other life, PNS associate editor Andrew Reding is a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute, and an international affairs expert for the Department of Justice.

SANIBEL, FLORIDA -- On a recent chilly and moonless night, I was seized by a compulsion I haven't felt since my teens. When an FM radio station announced that "self," one of a new breed of rock band, would appear in Fort Myers, I had to be there. Never mind that I live 26 miles away, on an island, and don't have a car. I braved the busy four-mile causeway to the mainland and another 22 mostly unlit miles each way on my mountain bike.

Behind the burst of energy was a newfound excitement about contemporary American music. As a 42-year-old whose formative years were during the rock and roll explosion of the 60s, I have felt like a musical exile for the last 25 years, put off by the elaborate orchestrations of the 70s, the superstars of the 80s, the rap and heavy metal of the last five years. What I've been missing is the unpretentious, innovative, uncensored energy of new bands that grow out of basement and garage jam sessions instead of record company marketing conclaves. For years, I had to look abroad for that kind of grassroots energy and authenticity -- to Jamaican and British reggae, or Australian rock and roll.

Now, in the mid-1990s, the grassroots dynamic has taken hold in the U.S., as alternative and punk rock go mainstream. What began with Nirvana and the Seattle bands has spread nationwide. Home-grown bands with names that would never pass muster with Hollywood and Nashville publicists -- Green Day, Offspring, Rancid, Toadies, Smashing Pumpkins -- are taking over the charts. Throughout April, alternative rock bands held four of the top ten slots on MTV's Video Countdown.

Like their names, these bands' music and lyrics have a raw edge. No saccharine love ditties here. Whether it's the Offspring confessing to having sex out of low self-esteem, Toadies exposing the dark side of religious fundamentalism, or Rancid seeing Christ in the homeless, lyrics speak to reality, warts and all. Yet the music -- with primally rhythmic bass and percussion -- delivers shots of adrenaline that help transform even discomforting encounters with reality into life-affirming ritual.

From the first strains and crashing refrains of "cannon" in Fort Myers, I felt irresistibly drawn to dance, as did most everyone else. The nightclub became a "mosh-pit" of communal energy. Not the gyrations of segregated couples and go-go girls, as in the 1960s, but an animated circle of beings pushing, catching, lifting and bouncing off each other that, to borrow a phrase from Nirvana, smelled like teen spirit among twenty and thirty-somethings.

The unassuming shaman of this tribal gathering -- 23-year-old lead singer-composer-guitarist Matt Mahaffey -- mocked symbols of propriety, with punk-inspired dyed-blonde locks and an "I Like to say F***" T-shirt. Yet the lyrics lacked the profanity, violence and sexism that have characterized much of modern music. It's not that Mahaffey and peers are trying to win the Tipper Gore seal of approval; just that they have something more meaningful to say.

Unlike their counterparts from the 1960s, the bards of the 1990s do not offer visions of social change: this is a time when ideologies seem exhausted. But neither are they the rebels without a cause of the 1950s. The rebellion of the 1990s is against dishonesty, pretentiousness, make-believe. Reluctant to reverence either individuals or institutions, its practitioners seldom capitalize proper nouns or personal pronouns. "I" becomes a more humble "i", "Elvis" just "elvis." Superstardom is demythologized. What does it mean to be widely admired by people you don't know, who don't know you? asks mahaffey.

There is a zen sensibility to much of the new music, as punk populism chips away at formality and pretension, often with humor. An entire song can be devoted to something as seemingly trivial as a piece of clothing. In "marathon shirt," for example, mahaffey lampoons the attachment all of us feel at one time or another to an article of clothing that "fell in love with me and wears me with pride ... once loaned her to a friend for a party and i worried all night like a mother does/ i'd wear her in any season/ i'd wear her for any reason ... i'm half a man without it/ i'm the king of style."

I bicycled the 26 miles home in 90 minutes, pedals spinning to the rhythms and lyrics reverberating in my mind. The experience struck a similar chord with other concert-goers: "self" topped the request lines on FM radio for the following week, and local record stores have reported brisk sales ever since. If only all rituals could be this satisfying.