Is the Jackass theme tune secretly political?
Minutemen were never quite as serious as their hardcore punk peers, especially not the likes of the band they opened for at their very first gig, Black Flag. However, the fact that they’re now intrinsically linked to Jackass of all things is more than a little strange.
After all, there’s something wonderfully timeless about Minutemen’s eclectic blend of hardcore, funk, jazz and avant-garde music. Not to mention the fact that, of their class of hardcore bands, they were one of the more high-minded. Yet the song of theirs that is inarguably the most famous will forever be associated with not only the early 2000s, but also one of the most gleefully, unabashedly stupid aspects of early 2000s culture. A high bar to clear for the era that gave the world Big Brother.
Jackass, however, was a cut above. Or perhaps that should be a cut below. The music of Minutemen will forever be associated with a group of SoCal burnouts tazering themselves in the bollocks, shitting into showroom toilets and hurtling down highways while packed into a shopping cart. What’s more, it kinda works? The Minutemen song the Jackass crew picked, ‘Corona’ does have an edge to it that’s as jaunty as it is dangerous, much like the stunts in the show.
This is a song that begins with that unforgettable, quavering, distorted guitar riff before launching into a rattling cow punk rave up. It’s ramshackle, charming and a little bit mad, much like the show it opens. You can imagine it smiling at you with blood pooling in between its teeth. One wonders whether the team looked a little bit deeper at the song before they decided to open their program with it, because otherwise they might have discovered something about it that doesn’t quite fit the tone of the show.
The fact that the song is deeply political.
Wait, the Jackass theme is a protest song?!
That is, and it speaks to what the Minutemen did better than just about anyone in their generation of hardcore bands. Balance the personal with the political. It’s easy to miss how jaunty and raucous the music is, and I most definitely did miss it in the chaos this caused at Minutemen’s famously thunderous live shows, but the lyrics make it very clear that this is a protest song about how the waste that the northern hemisphere of the world generates will ruin the Global South.
Despite this, though, the song is also about how the people living there will live through it, despite everything. This was something that the song’s author, Minutemen’s guitarist and songwriter D Boon, saw first-hand, as his bandmate Mike Watt detailed in an interview with Louder.
“Corona is very heartfelt,” he said, “D Boon wrote that one on a trip to Mexico. After all the drinking and the partying, the morning after, there’s a lady picking up bottles to turn them in to get monies for her babies. It really touched him.”
The song became a fan favourite and a minor hit on MTV after its release on the brand’s 1984 masterpiece Double Nickels on the Dime. Boon wouldn’t live to see it get a second life two decades after its release. He was killed in a car accident a year after the song’s release, but everyone who knew him would tell you he’d probably find the song’s popularity today absolutely hilarious. Plus, the royalties from the song were used to help Boon’s father fight against his emphysema. Silver linings, I guess.