BBC’s Motor City’s Burning – MC5


BBC’s Motor City’s Burning – MC5

Related Lessons

lesson:
The Sound of Blue Collar Detroit

Grades: High
Subjects: Social Studies/History

How did Rock and Roll serve as an expressive tool for the working-class youth of Detroit?

Related People

people:
MC5

Along with their Detroit-area contemporaries the Stooges, the MC5 helped to lay the musical and attitudinal foundations for punk rock. Both bands shared a loud, confrontational approach. But where the Stooges' wildness was an end in itself, the MC5 adopted an impassioned political stance, embracing radical  rhetoric in a raw, uncompromising manner. The band's passionate advocacy of sex, drugs and revolution led them to regularly run afoul of legal authorities as well as their own record company. Singer Rob Tyner and guitarists Wayne Kramer and Fred "Sonic" Smith founded the Motor City Five as a fairly conventional high-school combo in...