How Kraftwerk’s 22-Minute Song “Autobahn” Became an Early Masterpiece in Electronic Music (1975)

in History, Music, Technology | March 30th, 2026

It takes about five hours to drive from Düsseldorf to Hamburg on the Autobahn. During that stretch, you can listen to Kraftwerk’s album Autobahn seven times — or if you prefer, you can loop its eponymous opening song thirteen times. For it was “Autobahn,” more so than Autobahn, that changed the sound of music around the world in ways we still hear today. “Germany was suddenly on the musical map,” writes the Guardian’s Tim Jonze. “David Bowie – who used to ride the autobahn while listening to the record – moved to Berlin and went on to make the electronically influenced Low, “Heroes” and Lodger. Brian Eno relocated to the rural village of Forst to record with the influential avant-garde band Harmonia.” Soon would come the electronic pop of Ultravox, DAF and the Eurythmics, followed by Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s floodgate-opening “I Feel Love”.

Not a bad pop-cultural coup for, as Jonze puts it, “a 22-minute 43-second song about the German road network.” At the time of its release in early 1975, Kraftwerk had put out three full albums, but what would become their signature Teutonic-electronic sound hadn’t quite taken shape. But it was already clear that their work took its inspiration from twentieth-century modernity, a subject of which no single work of man in their homeland could have been more evocative than the Autobahn.

With its origins in the Weimar Republic and its long stretches without a speed limit, the German freeway network is internationally regarded as a concrete symbol of total personal freedom, and total personal responsibility, within a highly rule-respecting culture. To the young members of Kraftwerk, who often drove the Düsseldorf-Hamburg section, it held out the promise of freedom.

So did the then-new Minimoog synthesizer, which cost as much as a Volkswagen at the time, but offered the chance to make music like nothing the public had ever heard before. “Autobahn” captured the imaginations of listeners everywhere with not just its electronic effects, but also the incongruity of their combination with instruments like the flute (a holdover from Kraftwerk’s earlier compositions) and vehicular sounds evocative of a genuine road trip — all assembled at what would then have seemed a hypnotically expansive length for a pop song. Little did even the hippest listeners of the mid-seventies, such as the Americans tuned into early free-form FM stations where no corporate programming rules applied, know that they were hearing what Jones calls “the point where electronic pop music truly began.” All car trips run out of road eventually, but humanity’s journey into the possibilities of high-tech music shows no signs of approaching its end.

Kraftwerk Plays a Live 40-Minute Version of their Signature Song “Autobahn:” A Soundtrack for a Long Road Trip (1974)

How Kraftwerk Made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Kraftwerk’s First Concert: The Beginning of the Endlessly Influential Band (1970)

How the Moog Synthesizer Changed the Sound of Music

Hear the Evolution of Electronic Music: A Sonic Journey from 1929 to 2019

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

When Soviet Youth Bootlegged Western Rock Music on Discarded X‑Rays: Hear Original Audio Samples

in Film, History, Music | March 27th, 2026

A catchy tribute to mid-century Soviet hipsters popped up a few years back in a song called “Stilyagi” by lo-fi L.A. hipsters Puro Instinct. The lyrics tell of a charismatic dude who impresses “all the girls in the neighborhood” with his “magnitizdat” and guitar. Wait, his what? His magnitizdat, man! Like samizdat, or underground press, magnitizdat—from the words for “tape recorder” and “publishing”—kept Soviet youth in the know with surreptitious recordings of pop music. Stilyagi (a post-war subculture that copied its style from Hollywood movies and American jazz and rock and roll) made and distributed contraband music in the Soviet Union. But, as an NPR piece informs us, “before the availability of the tape recorder and during the 1950s, when vinyl was scarce, ingenious Russians began recording banned bootleg jazz, boogie woogie and rock ‘n’ roll on exposed X‑ray film salvaged from hospital waste bins and archives.” See one such X‑ray “record” above, and see here the fascinating process dramatized in the first scene of a 2008 Russian musical titled, of course, Stilyagi (translated into English as “Hipsters”—the word literally means “obsessed with fashion”).

These records were called roentgenizdat (X‑ray press) or, says Sergei Khrushchev (son of Nikita), “bone music.” Author Anya von Bremzen describes them as “forbidden Western music captured on the interiors of Soviet citizens”: “They would cut the X‑ray into a crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a hole. You’d have Elvis on the lungs, Duke Ellington on Aunt Masha’s brain scan….” The ghoulish makeshift discs sure look cool enough, but what did they sound like? Well, as you can hear below in the Beatles samples, a bit like old Victrola phonograph records played through tiny transistor radios on a squonky AM frequency.

Dressed in fashions copied from jazz and rockabilly albums, stilyagi learned to dance at underground nightclubs to these tinny ghosts of Western pop songs, and fought off the Komsomol—super-square Leninist youth brigades—who broke up roentgenizdat rings and tried to suppress the influence of bourgeois Western pop culture. According to Artemy Troitsky, author of Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia, these records were also called “ribs”: “The quality was awful, but the price was low—a rouble or rouble and a half. Often these records held surprises for the buyer. Let’s say, a few seconds of American rock ’n’ roll, then a mocking voice in Russian asking: ‘So, thought you’d take a listen to the latest sounds, eh?, followed by a few choice epithets addressed to fans of stylish rhythms, then silence.”

See more images of bone music records over at Laughing Squid and Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly’s blog Street Use, and above dig some historical footage of stilyagi jitterbugging through what appears to be a kind of Soviet training film about Western influence on Soviet youth culture, produced no doubt during the Khrushchev thaw when, as Russian writer Vladimir Voinovich tells NPR, things got “a little more liberal than before.”

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

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An Introduction to Brutalism: The Iconic Postwar Architectural Style That Combined Utopianism and Concrete

in Architecture, History | March 26th, 2026

The artificial language of Esperanto was conceived with high ideals in mind. In the eighteen-eighties, its creator L. L. Zamenhof envisioned it as the universal second language of humanity, and if it hasn’t achieved that status by now, it at least remains the world’s most widely spoken constructed auxiliary language. One factor complicating its spread is that no language, even one guided by internationalism, can remain the same for long enough in two different cultures. As in spoken and written languages, so in the concrete one of architecture — and in the case of the style known as Brutalism, that would be literal concrete. Meant to make humanity whole again after the Second World War, its buildings ended up being rather more particular, and less utopian, than their architects intended.

Examples aplenty appear in the new video above from Built Narrative, which offers what amounts to a postcard tour of Brutalist (and Brutalism-adjacent) buildings from around the world. Named for its main material béton brut, or raw concrete, the style came into its own during the rebuilding of war-ruined sections of British and continental European cities — and, over in the U.S., the rapid proliferation and expansion of college campuses — which had to be done quickly and under less-than-extravagant budgets.

Libraries, research facilities, city halls, administrative buildings, courthouses, housing projects: these are the sorts of structures that most often took Brutalist form in the nineteen-fifties, sixties, and seventies, resulting in the institutional, bureaucratic, and in some places totalitarian associations it still has today.

Some publicly loathed Brutalist buildings, like the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth and the Third Church of Christ, Scientist in Washington, D.C. have been torn down, often after decades of negligent maintenance. Others, like the Barbican Estate in London or Habitat 67 in Montreal, are now beloved sites of pilgrimage. Widely acknowledged masters of Brutalism include Le Corbusier, who pioneered it with buildings like the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille (not Berlin, contra the caption in the video) and Kenzo Tange (pronounced “tawn-gay,” not “tang” as the narrator says it), whose work steered the Japanese version of the movement in its own subtle, sometimes playful directions. Now, thanks in part to the rapid diffusion of architectural photography made possible by social media, a new enthusiast of Brutalism seems to be born every minute. Even if they don’t believe that architecture can bring a new world into being, they still feel the pull of a future that never came — or, at any rate, hasn’t come yet.

Why People Hate Brutalist Buildings on American College Campuses

Why Do People Hate Modern Architecture?: A Video Essay

Goodbye to the Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo’s Strangest and Most Utopian Apartment Building

The World According to Le Corbusier: An Animated Introduction to the Most Modern of All Architects

An Espresso Maker Made in Le Corbusier’s Brutalist Architectural Style: Raw Concrete on the Outside, High-End Parts on the Inside

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How the Hoover Dam Works: A 3D Animated Introduction

in History, Technology | March 25th, 2026

When it comes to tourist pilgrimage sites in the United States, the Hoover Dam may not quite rank up there with the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon, or Disneyland. But that’s not due to a lack of importance, nor even a lack of impressiveness. Proper appreciation of its man-made majesty, however, requires an understanding of not just the vital function it serves, but the enormous task of its construction. The guides at the Hoover Dam have been trained to explain just that to its many visitors, of course, but all of us could benefit from going in prepared with a little knowledge. Watch the hour-long video on the dam’s design and construction from Animagraffs above, and you may be prepared with enough knowledge to tell the guides a thing or two.

Animagraffs is the YoTtube channel of Jacob O’Neal, which we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture for its acclaimed explanations on a sixteenth-century explorer’s sailing ship and the Golden Gate Bridge, another iconic construction project of the Great Depression. Like those, his Hoover Dam video uses detailed 3D models based on serious research, not least into the project’s original design documents.

This allows O’Neal to show each element of the dam and its complex system of supporting infrastructure in detail and from every angle, as well as in a kind of x‑ray vision. We’ve all seen photographs of the Hoover Dam, and maybe even bought some from its gift shop, but even the most sublime aerial view doesn’t reveal as much about its ambition as a look into its inner workings.

And the ambition of the Hoover Dam is one aspect guaranteed to impress any viewers. It required thousands of workers about five years to re-shape the Nevada and Arizona landscape at a grand enough scale to make possible human control of the mighty — and, more to the point, mightily unpredictable — Colorado River. With its large turbines, the engineering and installation of which O’Neal explains in full, it managed to generate enough electricity to repay its construction cost of more than $811 million in today’s dollars by 1987, just over 50 years after it opened. And in an achievement almost impossible to believe today, it opened more than two years ahead of schedule. We hear a good deal today about the concept of “state capacity,” and how the U.S. could regain it. At the Hoover Dam, we behold state capacity quite literally made concrete.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Fascinating Engineering of the Titanic: How the Great Ocean Liner Was Built

in History, Technology | March 16th, 2026

When many of us first learned of the RMS Titanic, it was presented first as one of history’s greatest ironies: the “unsinkable” ocean liner that went down on its maiden voyage. Of course, there’s a great deal more to the story, as anyone who becomes obsessed with the ill-fated ship (James Cameron being just one notable example) understands full well. Even apart from the many human experiences surrounding it, some of them told by the wreck’s survivors and preserved on film, the mechanical aspects of the Titanic hold out considerable fascination for anyone with an engineer’s cast of mind. Put aside, for the moment, the matter of the sinking, and consider just what went into making it one of the most glorious creations of man launched into the ocean to date — or rather, one of the three most glorious.

The Titanic was one of a trio of similar White Star Line ships completed in the early nineteen-tens. In the video above, Bill Hammack, known on YouTube as Engineerguy, tells the story of not just the Titanic, but also the Olympic and the HMHS Britannic. An engineering professor at the University of Illinois, he found in the campus library issues of the journal The Engineer published between 1909 and 1911 that contain detailed photographs of the construction of both the Titanic and Olympic, sister ships that were built side-by-side.

One element highlighted that we may not much consider today is the sheer scale of the things: each was held together by three million rivets, could contain 1.5 million gallons of ballast water, weighed 52,000 tons when fully fitted, required 23 tons of lubricant to slide from the dock into the water, and burned 650 tons of coal per day on a transatlantic crossing.

Alas, size alone wasn’t enough to prevent disaster. “Less than a year after the launch of these two giant ships, one suffered a collision that ripped a gaping hole in its side,” says Hammack. “That ship was of course, the Olympic.” Its sudden encounter with a passing warship necessitated patching with wood before it could return home for a full repair, but thereafter it remained in service for nearly a quarter-century. Its less lucky sibling ended up at the bottom of the ocean after running into trouble of its own: a mine and a torpedo spelled the end for the Britannic in 1916. As for the Titanic, we all know about its fateful encounter with the iceberg, and maybe we’ve even heard discussions of how its designers could have mitigated the impact: more or taller bulkheads, a double hull rather than just a double bottom, greater lifeboat capacity. As for whether and how those solutions would have worked, perhaps Hammack could still shoot a follow-up explaining it all to us.

See the First 8K Footage of the Titanic, the Highest-Quality Video of the Shipwreck Yet

The Titanic: Rare Footage of the Ship Before Disaster Strikes (1911–1912)

Titanic Survivor Interviews: What It Was Like to Flee the Sinking Luxury Liner

The Sinking of the Britannic: An Animated Introduction to the Titanic’s Forgotten Sister Ship

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How the Long-Lost Body of Richard III Was Found Under a Parking Lot: Solving a 500-Year-Old Mystery

in History | March 12th, 2026

Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard the Third begins with the eponymous character uttering the famous line “Now is the winter of our discontent.” It ends at the Battle of Bosworth Field, by which point his villainous schemes have come to ruin and his desertion by Lord Stanley seems to have sealed his fate. “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse,” he cries out, coining another expression used four centuries later before being slain by the Earl of Richmond, the man who would be Henry VII. Though Shakespeare himself was writing more than 100 years after the historical events he dramatized, he included little after the event of Richard’s death, whose most fascinating mystery was in any case only solved in our own time.

You can see the story of Richard III’s long-unknown whereabouts in the Primal Space video above. According to records, says the narrator, “he was buried unceremoniously beneath the Greyfriars Church in Leicester, and a monument was eventually placed above his grave.” When Henry VIII ordered such houses of worship shut down forty years later, Greyfriars was among the institutions demolished.

Everyone eventually came to believe that, amid this destruction, Richard’s body had been exhumed and tossed off the Bow Bridge. Only in the early two-thousands did a search for his corpse commence in earnest, spearheaded by the Richard III Society. Having determined that the Bow Bridge story had been made up, the society’s members then had to pin down the long-confused former location of Greyfriars Church.

One of them, Philippa Langley, got the hunch to start looking under a Leicester parking lot. Budgetary limitations forced her team to try digging just three trenches across spaces likeliest to cross the church’s footprint. “Amazingly, just six hours into the first day, they came across a skeleton” with skull damage and spinal curvature. Richard was indeed described as a “hunchback” in his lifetime, but in the twenty-first century, only DNA evidence closes the case. Its acquisition necessitated both finding a couple unbroken female lines (the only means of transmitting mitochondrial DNA) from his sister down to living, testable individuals while carbon-dating the skeleton. Sure enough, Richard turned out to have been in eternal repose not just under that parking lot, but near a stenciled letter R — the kind of coincidence from which even the Bard himself might have shied away.

74 Ways Characters Die in Shakespeare’s Plays Shown in a Handy Infographic: From Snakebites to Lack of Sleep

How England First Became England: An Animated History

Hear What Hamlet, Richard III & King Lear Sounded Like in Shakespeare’s Original Pronunciation

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Who Would Be Emperor If the Roman Empire Still Existed Today?

in History, Politics | March 10th, 2026

During Wimbledon a few years ago, a thread about King Felipe VI of Spain went viral. It was posted to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter by Derek Guy, author of the menswear blog Die, Workwear! “Very rare to see this level of tailoring nowadays, even on the wealthy,” he commented on a photo of Felipe in the stands on the tournament’s last day. Even when not attending major sporting events, the king’s collars always hug his neck, his lapels are always well-proportioned, the lines of his coat always flow into his trousers, and his four-in-hand always has just the right asymmetry. For my money, such self-presentation befits not just a monarch, but indeed an emperor.

It so happens that Felipe is one of the most plausible candidates for that job, at least in the hypothetical scenario that the Roman Empire never declined and fell. He’s also the only actual sitting monarch among them, though each of the others can also make his own credible claim to the imperial throne.

So who would rightfully rule over a still-extant Roman Empire? Understanding that history buffs enjoy nothing more than a speculative but knowledge- and judgment-intensive debate of that kind, UsefulCharts creator Matt Baker (whose online store happens to offer a Roman emperors family tree poster) once invited thirteen history YouTubers to cast their votes — and, of course, explain their answers.

In addition to Felipe, the roster of potential modern-day Roman emperors includes Dündar Ali Osman, heir to the Ottoman dynasty, and Andrew Romanov, heir to the Russian throne (a choice for those who accept the onetime description of Moscow as the “third Rome”). Alas, both have died since the making of this video, but the claimants who could draw their legitimacy from the legacy of the Holy Roman Empire live on: the still relatively young Jean-Christophe Napoléon, a descendant of Bonaparte’s brother, and Karl von Habsburg, the undisputed current head of the eponymous house. In favor of each candidate, one can make a variety of arguments political, cultural, and geographical. Nor, as some of us would insist, can we reasonably ignore the sartorial.

What Did the Roman Emperors Look Like?: See Photorealistic Portraits Created with Machine Learning

Ancient Roman Coins Reveal the Existence of a Forgotten Roman Emperor

Five Hardcore Deaths Suffered By Roman Emperors

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The History of Europe from 400 BC to the Present, Animated in 12 Minutes

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

AI Figures Out the Rules of a Mysterious 2,000-Year-Old Board Game from Ancient Rome

in Games, History | March 9th, 2026

Image by Walter Crist

As far as enthusiasm for board games goes, no continent has yet outdone Europe. Its advantage could lie in the highly developed culture of low-cost leisure evident in quite a few of its societies; it could also owe to the fact that board games seem to have been played there continuously since antiquity. We’ve long had evidence of examples like the “Roman mill game,” better known today as nine men’s morris, which Ovid appears to mention in his Ars Amatoria of the very early first century. Not that modern knowledge of Roman tabletop gaming is complete. In one puzzling case, the stone board above was unearthed in a former Roman town in the Netherlands, but how a game was played on it remained a mystery — until machine learning came along.

“To examine whether the object may have been used as a game board, we performed use-wear analysis to identify evidence for gameplay and we simulated play using artificial intelligence (AI),” write the team of researchers who recently published a paper on the subject in the journal Antiquity. They used a system called Ludii, engineered to analyze board-game rules.

“This software allows for AI-driven playout simulation, where two AI agents play a game against one another, which can generate quantitative data on gameplay. In this instance, we explored whether the rules of a game would produce the wear pattern seen on the stone.” The idea, in other words, was to let the computer play against itself using different rules until it came upon a game that would continue to abrade away the surface of the board in the same fashion as it already was.

This process narrowed it down to games “in which the goal is to block the opponent from moving, and those in which the goal is to place three pieces in a row.” These have a fairly long documented history, from Scandinavia’s haretavl, to Italy’s gioco dell’orso to Spain’s liebre perseguida, to Greece’s kinégi tou lagoú. You can download what the research suggests is the most plausible rule set for this particular Roman board game here, board design included. One player takes the side of the “hunter,” with four pieces, and the other the side of the “prey,” with two. The former tries to trap the latter’s pieces, moving only along the board’s lines; in the next round, the roles reverse. The hunter who does the job in the fewest moves wins. Why not invite friends over to spend an evening playing like a Roman? For a thoroughly ancient good time, first reconstruct as best you can the ambience of the thermopolium at home.

Behold the First American Board Game, Travellers’ Tour Through the United States (1822)

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Kurt Vonnegut’s Lost Board Game Is Finally for Sale

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Kraftwerk’s 22-Minute Song “Autobahn” Became an Early Masterpiece in Electronic Music (1975)

When Soviet Youth Bootlegged Western Rock Music on Discarded X‑Rays: Hear Original Audio Samples

An Introduction to Brutalism: The Iconic Postwar Architectural Style That Combined Utopianism and Concrete

How the Hoover Dam Works: A 3D Animated Introduction

The Fascinating Engineering of the Titanic: How the Great Ocean Liner Was Built

How the Long-Lost Body of Richard III Was Found Under a Parking Lot: Solving a 500-Year-Old Mystery

Who Would Be Emperor If the Roman Empire Still Existed Today?

AI Figures Out the Rules of a Mysterious 2,000-Year-Old Board Game from Ancient Rome

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