Poison
by MC5

Album: High Time (1971)
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Songfacts®:

  • A track from the third and final MC5 album, "Poison" deals with politics and the environment. It was written by guitarist Wayne Kramer, who said in a Songfacts interview: "I was trying to come up with a metaphor for the corruption. I was becoming aware that, for example, in Detroit, these giant manufacturing facilities - the steel companies that forged the steel that went into automobile manufacturing - were spewing tons and tons of pollutants into the air. I just thought, That can't be good for you.

    I could see it. In the '60s, when you would fly around America and you would come down out of the clouds to land the plane, if you were coming down into Pittsburgh, Detroit, Newark, New Jersey or Gary, Indiana, you would see this line where the air turned brown as you descended down to the airport. I thought, That can't be good to breathe.

    This was really a poison, but the poison was larger, and it was more pervasive than just in the air. It was in the way that big business controlled government. So I wanted to talk about that in a metaphorical way."

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