8. MC5, ‘Kick Out the Jams’ (1969)

Forget flower-power, the crash-bang throttle of the first 10 minutes of the MC5's debut made garage-rockers of the era sound weak and tentative by comparison. "I wanna hear some revolution out there," unapologetically militant singer Rob Tyner, quoting Eldridge Cleaver, screams. And while not everyone was ready for revolution — writing for Rolling Stone in 1969, Lester Bangs said the Motor City 5 used noise and aggression to "conceal a paucity of ideas." — history shows the album pushing underground rock towards an aggression precipice. It's quaint to think of now, but the opening command — "Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!" — so riled the band's label, Elektra, that the company prepared both edited and unedited versions. Peter Doggett reports in his book There's a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and the Rise and Fall of '60s Counter-Culture that an unedited batch went to the retail chain Hudson's. When they sent back the stock and refused to stock either version, the band had an even more choice message to them in a series of national ads: "Fuck Hudson's!" Arielle Castillo