Kick Out the (Organic) Jams: How the MC5 Taught Us About Rock and Revolution (Interview)

When you think '1960s rock legends," it may conjure up images of Dylan, Jagger, Lennon, and Hendrix. Contemplate radical rock and roll activism and you might hear Rage Against the Machine bangin' in your head. But there's an underappreciated band that fits both categories: The MC5 (a.k.a. Motor City 5).

Mathew J. Bartkowiak, an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Marshfield/Wood County, is fully aware of the immense contributions of this seminal Detroit rock ensemble. In fact, he's written a book to demonstrate it: The MC5 and Social Change: A Study in Rock and Revolution.

Punk before punk, metal before metal, but always radical:

"The original inspiration for this book came from a graduate course I was taking at Michigan State on American radicalism," says Bartkowiak. "I chose to focus on the MC5 for a research project for the course." He did so because they seemed, to him, "like the perfect intersection of my interest in popular music studies, and my increasing interest in studying American dissent, especially the 60s counterculture."

To find out more about Bartkowiak's book and to learn how the MC5 can still inspire us today, I interviewed Mat via e-mail in February 2010.

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Planet Green: What first turned you on to the MC5?

Mat Bartkowiak: I had been aware of the band since working at a record store while I was in college. Having anecdotally known about the band's association with the White Panther Party throughout the years I was listening to them, I thought this might be a great opportunity to find out what exactly the Party was, and what their relationship was to the band. A few years of research and numerous interviews with those involved helped what was originally a research paper, then a dissertation, eventually turn into this book.

PG: While bands like the Beatles, Stones, and The Who remain synonymous with 60s counterculture, the MC5 are lesser known yet may have had a more enduring impact in terms of activism. Is it fair to say the MC5 laid the foundation for the bridge between popular music and radical politics?

MB: Rock and Roll, from its inception, has been linked to rebellion and alienation. The MC5, in a sense, were doing the same thing that many artists like the artists you mention were doing. They were using music as a space of subversion, of recklessness, dissent, and profit. The thing that pushed the band into a new stratum of dissent was creating a "formal" political party/platform: The White Panther Party (WPP). The WPP, in addition to supporting the Black Panthers, also supported free love, dope, the end of capitalism, and the end of the Vietnam War, along with numerous other aims. This perked the interest of many: local, state, federal authorities; the music industry; fans; critics who saw it as a gimmick; critics who embraced the posturing; and numerous other invested/reviled/threatened perspectives. As informal as the creation/maintenance was of the WPP, when combined with the music of the MC5, it became a concern from the desk of Lester Bangs to The Oval Office, some taking it as a joke, others as a potential subversive force speaking to kids through popular culture. I use the phrase "useable rebellion" a lot in the book, as the MC5 was a sort of popular culture raw material that was interpreted in a lot of different ways, even within the band and WPP community themselves.

PG: Compared to today's rockers (read: Bono, etc.) schmoozing with presidents and World Bank executives, it's still fascinating to consider the MC5 hanging out with Huey P. Newton and Fred Hampton. Do you think rock star rebellion has been effectively co-opted today?

MB: The great thing about popular music is that it is a renewable resource. For every "co-opted" force one might perceive to be out there, there are numerous other organic and not-so-organic forces rising from the embers. It is a constant process of: bottom-up, top-down, bottom-up power and control. Music can provide an ideal place to stoke people's passions, and to expose them to new or challenging ideologies. It can also be a place to profit from such actions. Reflecting such sentiment, the MC5 members themselves had numerous views on the band and their relation to the WPP. For some involved, the power of popular culture was one that could help them reach the masses with revolutionary sentiment and their "high-energy" music: shaking the cobwebs off of their audience's day-to-day lives. The thought of using the "system" itself to dismantle the "system" was promising for these early experimenters with media. It was an electrified, loud, aggressive embodiment of all of rock n' roll's promises that had been present within the music since its inception. Others believed in the power of the music, but didn't have political aims. There were also quite a few interpretations that existed between these boundaries.

Are you ready to testify?

PG: Will we ever see another band like the MC5?

MB: Getting down to the nitty-gritty, I think that there will always be a place for rebellion in rock 'n' roll. There will always be questions of the authentic. There will always be people looking to sell it. There will also be a place for those who have the best hopes for music to act as a tool of social change and development. The divisions between these things are, with some digging, never as clear as we would like to think. To borrow a phrase from the 5, if you can "Get up on the stand," and find a place in music, whether through creation or reception, where you can question and critically interrogate the world around you, you've made that music yours. At that point, it becomes a remarkably potent ideological and social form for those invested.

PG: Planet Green readers are always looking to get involved and take action. How can the example of the MC5 inspire them?

MB: Music, like all popular culture is a space where ideology, identity, and numerous other issues are contested. A group like the MC5 can demonstrate the influence a creation of popular culture can have. Though dismissed by their fair share of critics, I find it fascinating that simply put...it worked for some people. To this day, the MC5's rawness, their energy, and their connection to dissent continues to inspire many. Some are content with the music itself; others like the possibility that the MC5 represented something beyond the music...something plugged-in to the foundational promises of rock and rebellion. The MC5 looked to harness the power of rock n' roll and the mass media. The reins quickly fell out of their hands though and they found themselves out of control and under increasing pressure from the Government, the New Left, critics, etc. In terms of getting involved in anything, don't underestimate the power of art, popular culture, etc. (however you want to divide the lines between them). Though products labeled as "popular culture" might be thought of as cursory or ephemeral, though art may be thought of as only reflecting our lives, both can, at the very least, become flashpoints in which our ideologies, values, and thoughts are fought out. Hence, it can be a powerful, albeit difficult to control, force to be reckoned with in everyday life.

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