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American SongAuthor: Joe Hines
American Song is a podcast that traces the origins and development of American - and ultimately world-wide - forms of modern musical entertainment. Over time, we will trace every major genre from its origins through the current day.American Song looks at the development of our music through the lens of social, political, and economic changes that were occurring in each case, and we'll feature the most important musicians in each genre.Every episode is chock-full of the music we love and where possible, we include archival interviews so you can hear about, in the actual words and voices of these great musicians and singers, the motives and passions that drove their creativity. Language: en-us Genres: Arts, Music, Music History, Performing Arts Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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New Wave — Up From the Ooze (How Kraftwerk, CBGB, and a Twelve-Foot Room on the Bowery Accidentally Invented the Future)
Episode 3
Thursday, 19 March, 2026
Get in touch!Five hundred million years ago, ( approximately 1977), something extraordinary happened on the floor of an ancient sea. Life — which had spent billions of years as little more than a few unremarkable blobs drifting in the dark — suddenly exploded into every possible form simultaneously. Claws. Fins. Shells. Eyes. Creatures of impossible elegance and alien strangeness, emerging from the murk and becoming something the world had never seen before. Scientists call it the Cambrian Explosion. It was the moment life stopped playing it safe.Rock music had its own Cambrian moment. And like the original, it happened in the dark, in conditions nobody would have designed on purpose, among creatures that looked like nothing that had come before.This is the first episode of American Song: New Wave — a new series tracing the origins, explosions, and enduring legacy of the genre that turned anxiety into an art form, made nervousness a fashion statement, and somehow got America dancing to songs about the end of the world.In this episode: Kraftwerk emerges from postwar Düsseldorf like something that evolved independently of everything else — precise, alien, and more perfectly adapted to the future than anything sharing its environment. The Ramones reduce rock to its purest possible form and discover that what's left is still everything. Television proves that minimalism and virtuosity are not opposites. And Patti Smith walks into a twelve-foot room on the Bowery and claims the entire territory of rock and poetry for herself, without asking anyone's permission, because it hadn't occurred to her that permission was required.New Wave didn't descend from the mainstream. It crawled up from somewhere older and stranger and more alive — from musicians too weird, too restless, or too furious to stay in the shallows. This is where it started. This is the murk.Music In This EpisodePeter Gabriel: IntruderKraftwerk: AutobahnKraftwerk: Trans Europ ExpressGary Numan: CarsThe Feelies: The Boy With the Perpetual NervousnessRamones: I Wanna Be SedatedRamones: Beat on the BratRamones: I Wanna Be Your BoyfriendTelevision: See No EvilTelevision: Marquee MoonPatti Smith: GloriaBlondie (Rhythm Only): One Way Or AnotherB-52's: Rock LobsterInterviewsRalf Hutter (Kraftwerk)Hilly Krystal (CBGB's)Marky Ramone (Ramones)Tom Verlaine (Television)Patti Smith (Patti Smith)Next episode: Blondie. Talking Heads. Devo. The B-52s. Oingo Boingo. New Wave goes national — and it turns out the whole country had been waiting.Join our community and continue your journey through American Song: Visit us on Facebook.There, you'll get more information, video content, and more about the music and personalities covered in all our episodes.
