UNDGRND

During Apartheid in South Africa, music was an essential art form for the disenfranchised coloured Africans to express their supression and suffering. We will visit a time of violent riots and gruesome events. From Sharpville to Soweto and into the prison walls of Robben Island.

While Alex is studying for his exams, Lennart charters a plane and flies around the world from Australia, Japan, to Hungary and the UK. On the way, we meet artists from different backgrounds performing rap, indi, techno and funk. Join our Underground revue to venues on all five continents around the world.

After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, young alternative artists had to go underground. Rock, indi, rap and electro music developed in small venues and behind bars of China's growing metropolis. On this episode we explore why and how today's young Chinese underground artists have lost much of its political edge over the past decades.

Alex is alone in the studio today and takes us on a trip to Compton. The suburb of L.A. that has brought up some of the most influential and successful rap artists in the world. Visti the beginnings of N.W.A and Dr. Dre.

Below the Berlin Wall, away from STASI surveillance and out of reach from the Socialist Unity Party in East Germany erupted a diverse Underground music scene. On today's show we explore the artists that defied their totalitarian communist regime during the Cold War and achieved the fall of the Berlin Wall.

On our second episode we venture back in time to the 70s and 80s when Fela Kuri and his followers shaped African music for decades to come and upset political authorities in Nigeria and abroad.

The Arab Spring was a wave of revolutions throughout the Middle East and North Africa that changed the face of its political establishment and gave rise to new emerging artists who risked everything they had when performing in underground venues. Join us on our journey from Tunesia to Egypt, Jordan and Syria.