Corona

D. Boon wrote "Corona", the seventh track of Side Mike on Double Nickels on the Dime, 2:24 on the original LP, 2:34 on the 1987 CD and 2:25 on the 1989 CD. Ethan James produced it at Radio Tokyo. Boon, Watt and Hurley took a short trip to Mexico over July 4, 1982, the trip that also inspired Watt's "I Felt Like a Gringo" on Buzz or Howl. According to Songfacts, the band fell asleep on the beach and woke to see a Mexican woman collecting their empty bottles; Boon was moved and wrote it in sympathy. The title is the beer brand. It is an uptempo hardcore polka, with a neo-norteno feel, in G major, with an opening twanging guitar riff and no chorus; its 53 words fall in three stanzas, and its last line is about a bottle of Corona for a poor woman because of its five-cent deposit. Wikipedia calls it an elegiac complaint about US injustice and destructive greed.

Johnny Knoxville picked it as the theme for MTV's Jackass, which premiered on October 1, 2000, and LA Weekly's Juan Gutierrez wrote that it finally broke big due to Jackass. Michael Azerrad of Billboard heard an ocean of scrabbling avant-funk, a norteno two-step, and Far Out calls it a punk rock polka and their most popular song. In March 2020 digital sales rose 70 percent and on-demand US streams 26 percent to 63,000, then 95 percent more the next week, to 122,000.

Setlist.fm counts 62 Minutemen performances, the fourth most played: the first was on October 20, 1983 at Fiesta House in Los Angeles and the last on December 13, 1985 at Park Center in Charlotte; 4 in 1983, 17 in 1984 and 41 in 1985. It was sixth in a 44-song set at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta on November 30, 1985. Others have played it 389 times across 21 artists, led by Calexico (214), Yonder Mountain String Band (76) and Yo La Tengo (16); Calexico played it at the 2013 Newport Folk Festival. We found no samples, and could not tell whether our upload is the album take.