Songfacts®:

• The Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg wrote this song after seeing U2 perform "I Will Follow" twice at a show in April 1981. Westerberg liked the sound of the song but had a problem with its message - he looked around him and saw a bunch of kids rebelling, not following. He wrote "Kids Don't Follow" in response.
  
  Westerberg didn't know that U2 frontman Bono wrote "I Will Follow" for his mother. It wasn't a blanket statement about youth.
• Westerberg often wrote songs as disgruntled responses to other songs. The Stink album is bookended with such songs, opening with "Kids Don't Follow" and closing with "Gimme Noise," a response to "Music For Boys" by The Suburbs.
• Before the song begins you can hear a recording of Minneapolis police busting a house party the band had thrown to raise rent money. Voices can be heard cursing out the cops. In Trouble Boys, author Bob Mehr confirms long-held rumors that one of the voices is that of Soul Asylum frontman Dave Pirner. Pirner explains they'd been hiding behind a soundboard and yelling because they knew the police couldn't identify where the voices were coming from.
  
  The Current asked Pirner about the event. Pirner confirmed he was there and called it "the second-best Minneapolis warehouse party ever," after a warehouse party dubbed "the Cold Party" and held by Minneapolis act Man Sized Action. It was catered by White Castle.
• The Replacements manager/producer Peter Jesperson was a sincere (some said fanatic) devotee of the band. He loved "Kids Don't Follow" and believed it was a groundbreaking song that had to be recorded ASAP. The band's label, Twin/Tone Records, hesitated because they still hadn't gotten their money back for Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, The Replacements' first studio album. The situation pushed Twin/Tone to demand that The Replacements sign a proper contract. The label and the band were small and hadn't entered into a formal binding agreement.
  
  Westerberg refused the stipulations of the contract and kicked off a years-long battle between the label and the band - one that eventually brought them to court. From Westerberg's perspective, he was getting ripped off. From Twin/Tone's perspective, The Replacements hadn't produced a cent of profit and had no leverage. The band had a passionate fanbase in their native Minnesota, but nothing much outside of that. Twin/Tone needed to recoup their investment, Westerberg wanted artistic freedom and a bigger slice of the pie. The most important thing is that Stink got made, anyway.
• The Replacements premiered "Kids Don't Follow" in January, 1982, while opening a Wisconsin show for their friendly rival Hüsker Dü. They'd driven to the venue in a van borrowed from the Suburbs. The three groups formed the holy trinity of the Minnesota 1970s/1980s music scene that heavily influenced punk rock's evolution into the more-melodic sound that would come to be labeled "alternative" music.