‘I Got A Right’: How The Stooges created the definitive punk rock anthem
What actually is punk? How many safety pins is too many safety pins? Can you tumble-dry bondage trousers? These are questions that have sparked debates across the landscape of punk and alternative music since its inception in the mid-1970s. Depending on who you ask, punk could represent anything from a politically charged, subversive DIY music scene to little more than a passing fashion trend. In truth, though, The Stooges managed to capture the spirit of punk years before that work had ever entered the minds of the music press.
Offering an alternative to the spaced-out, self-absorbent sounds of America’s hippie age, The Stooges first came together in 1967 in the wake of Michigan’s stunning garage rock movement. Fueled by amphetamines, guitar distortion, and anger, the band pioneered a furious, powerful new style of music that would shock mainstream US audiences. Even the band’s record label, Elektra, often tried to tone down the output of the band due to it being too heavy or violent, but ultimately, they could not stop the independent revolution that the band represented.
At the forefront of it all was frontman Iggy Pop, an unparalleled original within American rock and roll music. Growing a name for himself as a performer through his wild onstage antics, hatred of conventional clothing, and ability to consume enough drugs to knock out a family of elephants, Pop was the perfect catalyst for the age of proto-punk, which The Stooges ushered in. Even though he himself has often refuted claims that The Stooges birthed punk rock, the importance of his band on the development of that genre is inarguable.
Without The Stooges, artists like the Ramones, Patti Smith, Sex Pistols, or any other pioneers of punk’s first wave simply would not have existed. Not only did The Stooges first establish the inherent sound and musical conventions of punk, but they also encapsulated the attitude of the movement. Pop, in particular, was a formidable and defiant character during the era of The Stooges, operating entirely by his own desires without much care for the conventions of ‘ordinary’ American society.
This attitude was boiled down and purified by The Stooges, before being injected into their wonderfully abrasive track ‘I Got A Right’. Originally recorded in 1972 during the studio sessions for the band’s legendary record Raw Power, Elektra prevented the song from being released until years later, in 1977, as a result of its content being too violent. Nevertheless, it is the song that best captures the spirit and attitude of The Stooges, and it might just be one of punk rock’s definitive anthems.
Relatively simple in composition, particularly in comparison to some other moments in The Stooges’ discography, ‘I Got A Right’ is built around the repetitive lyrics, “Anytime I want I got a right to move, No matter what they say,” delivered by Pop with his usual urgency and aggression; the sonic equivalent of mainlining adrenaline. Although the song remains a relative obscurity for your average listener, given that it was released years after The Stooges folded in 1974, it is difficult to think of another song that captures the spirit of punk so succinctly or with such an impact.
Particularly when punk exploded into the mainstream in 1976, multiple artists attempted to establish their own ideas of what ‘punk’ really meant, to varying degrees of quality. Ultimately, though, it all came back to those simplistic lyrics Pop had belted out years prior: “I got a right, no matter what they say.” That attitude of following your own path and living the life that you want to live, in spite of everybody else, is probably the best answer to the age-old question of ‘What is punk?’.
Many other artists have made more complex, politically charged, and successful punk tracks in the years since The Stooges recorded ‘I Got A Right’, but none have managed to capture the zeitgeist of the movement in quite the same way as that little-known track. The Stooges had already defined the age of punk years before it even began.
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