The Ongoing History of New Music, episode 1089: 1976-The birth year of alt-rock, part 1

Alan Cross Corus Radio

October 9, 2026 9:00 am

The Ongoing History of New Music, episode 1089: 1976-The birth year of alt-rock, part 1 — This image released by A24 shows David Byrne in a scene from "Stop Making Sense." (Jordan Cronenweth/A24 via AP)

When was rock’n’roll born? That’s hard to pin down. It’s not like the world woke up one day and, all of a sudden, there was this brand-new genre of music that had emerged fully formed.

Rock’n’roll took years to come together in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It was an amalgamation of blues, rhythm & blues, country, western—yes, those were two separate genres—hillbilly music, and a few other things.

A new audience of post-war kids needed to come of age. Radio had to switch from carrying network shows out of New York to locally hosted DJ programs playing music. We needed the transistor radio. We needed the 45 RPM record.

And we needed a couple of “black swan” performers who were in the right place at the right time, with the right look, the right songs, and the right sound. Heck, it took years for the phrase “rock’n’roll” to catch on, thanks to DJ Alan Freed, who started using it on the radio around 1951.

So there is not a single song that we can point to and say, “This is where rock started.” We can’t even say it happened in a specific year. We can just narrow it down to a period as wide as 1947 to 1955. So, yeah, it took a long time for this rough beast to be born.

But alt-rock? …That might be a different thing altogether. And while there was always a weirdo, outsider component on the fringes of rock—if we’re being pedantic about it, we can identify proto-alt-rock elements from as far back as the late 1950s—there was one year when everything suddenly and explosively came together. In fact, it took just a few short months.

That year was 1976. It is generally accepted as Year Zero for punk, the time of the Big Bang that led to a deluge of left-of-centre music that branched off at a right angle from all the rock that had come before. And as such, 1976 can also be extrapolated as Year Zero for everything we call “alternative rock” today.

Let’s look at what happened during those crucial, pivotal months. Because, after all, if it hadn’t happened, you’d be listening to something else right now.

Songs heard on this show: