#33, “Kick Out the Jams,” MC5 (1969)

150 Favorite Songs: #33, “Kick Out the Jams,” MC5 (1969)

I didn’t know they were allowed to say “motherfucker” in songs back in the sixties until I heard “Kick Out the Jams” for the first time. Somehow, I guess, I figured swearing in music was a recent invention, something Ice Cube had come up with. But then, “Kick Out the Jams” is ahead of its time in a lot of ways.

The MC5 are one of those bands I think most people have to take the long way to discover, or at least they used to be. I have no idea how music discovery works for young people now. But I know the MC5 aren’t revered the way the Stooges are, that their name can’t be used as a shibboleth of underground coolness the way the Velvet Underground is. I know their songs aren’t ubiquitous and legendary because, with the exception of “Kick Out the Jams,” their songs aren’t very good. In the pre-Spotify days, I learned about the MC5 from reading about The Stooges, who I learned about from reading about David Bowie, who I learned about because of his relationship with Nine Inch Nails. Maybe it’s easier now, what with playlists and “listeners also played” tabs and so forth. But learning that the MC5 existed twenty years ago was hard, because they only had one song worth playing, and that song starts with the line “kick out the jams, motherfucker,” so you weren’t going to hear it on the radio.

But what’s amazing about “Kick Out the Jams” is that it really only took one song to solidify the band as wildly influential, among the most important to ever exist. I don’t know if punk rock as it developed in the seventies would have happened the way that it did without “Kick Out the Jams,” but I also don’t need to know, because I live in the timeline where it existed and traveled on a straight line from the MC5 to “No Fun” and “Search and Destroy” to the New York of the Dolls and Patti Smith all the way out to New South Wales and Radio Birdman before coming back to America for “Blitzkrieg Bop” and then across the ocean to Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer, and on and on and on and on through to Neck Deep recording “We Need More Bricks,” and then whatever comes next. If we really are all just infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters trying to crank out the works of Shakespeare here, then it makes some sense that a group of twenty-year-old kids in Detroit might have heard something in “La Bamba” and “You Really Got Me” and “Louie Louie” that made them think that rock and roll would sound good as hell if you played it just as loudly and aggressively and sloppily as you could, that it would make everyone who heard it jump to awareness if you started out by screaming “kick out the jams, motherfucker,” and that this was only the beginning of the energy it might contain. The MC5 did their part in two minutes and forty-five seconds, and then the rest of the world picked up what they were putting down and gave a lot of fucked-up kids something that made them feel less alone, gave them somewhere to put their feelings that was creative and not just destructive.

The album “Kick Out the Jams” comes from is both the MC5’s debut and also a live album, which is audacious as hell, but it makes sense for a band whose songwriting was never really the point. There’s an ephemeral quality to the song as a result, that we only get to hear it, and get to hear it sound so good, because they played it one night the tape happened to be rolling. The song itself makes that feel right, too, since despite the defiant cry that starts it off, it’s not really about anything anyway. Or it is about something, but the only thing it’s about is playing “Kick Out the Jams.” we got a guitar and the crash of the drums / we wanna keep on rocking till the morning comes / let me be who i am / and let me kick out the jams is about as self-referential as music gets, what we’d come to know as “meta,” just a song about playing the song, both self-indulgent and also fiercely urgent, like you could believe it’s being written on the spot.

It makes sense, I suppose, that other bands would want to experience that urgency, so there are a lot of covers of the song out there. Pearl Jam’s played it live many times over the years, reading it as the sort of punk rock song it inspired and letting the drums just get faster and faster. Rage Against the Machine took it for a spin in the studio on their covers album, Renegades, where they did the opposite and slowed it down till so they could hear just how heavy it could get. The Presidents of the United States of America, of all bands, did a cute version in the studio where they changed the lyrics to be a bit sillier, but it’s likable anyway. The Blue Oyster Cult would play it live, but swapped out the “motherfucker” at the beginning for a more wholesome “brothers and sisters,” which renders the song downright toothless. Jeff Buckley incorporated it into his sets while touring Europe in 1995, delivering a surprisingly ferocious version that he’d then spin into the extremely delicate “Lilac Wine” in an attempt to give the audience whiplash. I think the first version I ever heard, though I had no idea that it was a cover at the time, was the studio version recorded by the Bad Brains with Henry Rollins on vocals, which appeared on the (extremely good) soundtrack to the movie Pump Up the Volume. For a song that was performed and recorded to feel like it only mattered for two minutes and forty-five seconds, “Kick Out the Jams” lives forever. You never really know what will.