MC5

Stripped of much of their earlier revolutionary ire, this sophomore album finds the Detroit proto-punks veering towards the pop flame as they attempt to counteract the scorched earth that Kick Out the Jams blazed as the musical arm of the White Panther party. These tracks are leaner, meaner and more melodic but also, strangely, more subversive. Their best work.

Wop-bop-a-lu-bop-a-lop-bam-boom. Thud. "Tutti Frutti," which opens the partly excellent
MC5 album, is easily the worst cut on it, and in a way a clue to the rest of the record, which
ends, stiffly enough, with "Back in the USA." The MC5 have roots; or their producer Jon
Landau does, or somebody does. Over four minutes of totally pointless music is expended
in "proving" that fact -- and regardless of the possible coy significance of this on... More >

A severe disappointment at first--a rather obvious and awkward attempt, I thought, to tailor a record to some dimly conceived high school "underground," with titles like "Teenage Lust" and lines like "Young people everywhere are gonna cook their goose/Lots of kids are working to get rid of these blues" (political italics mine). But the music had its way with me. Under Jon Landau, the 5's style has become choppier, harder, and more concise; when his discipline is imposed on the soaring Sinclair-meets-Coltrane expansionism of their Elektra album, as on "Looking at You," the tension is pyrotechnic. The only failure is the ballad, "Let Me Try." But all that will make this album an undeniable success is for it to sell--with propaganda, that's the test. Which means it will probably remain an ambiguous experiment. (Grade - A-)