Bastards of Young

Westerberg reworked the lyric over several drafts. It is about alienation, and partly about his sister Mary, who left Minneapolis to look for acting work in New York. He described the song as the band reaching out a hand to say they were just as confused as their listeners. A line about income tax hints both at the label possibly treating the band as a tax write-off and at Westerberg's New Year's Eve birth, reportedly timed by his mother for a tax break. A commonly misheard line in the chorus comes from the Bible, and Westerberg had forgotten the correct wording until Mehr pointed it out. The sparse guitar intro is modeled on early Who records, and the coda repeats a vocal phrase over Chris Mars's drum fills.

Randy Skinner directed the black-and-white video from a concept by Jeff Ayeroff. It is mostly one shot of a speaker in Skinner's apartment, as the camera pulls back to show a smoking listener who kicks the speaker in and walks away. It cost $10,000, and the costliest item was a dog in the background at $500 a day. It had moderate airplay on MTV's 120 Minutes.

Live and legacy

On Saturday Night Live on 18 January 1986, a late substitute for the Pointer Sisters, the band played it with Kiss Me on the Bus, turned up their amps against instructions, and Westerberg shouted an expletive at Bob Stinson on air. Co-manager Russ Rieger recalled Lorne Michaels telling them they would never perform on television again. setlist.fm logs it 218 times, the band's fourth most played song, from 7th Street Entry in July 1985 to Porto in June 2015.

AllMusic's Jason Ankeny called it a rallying cry for a generation of misfits, Diffuser.fm ranked it the band's best song, and the Guardian placed it fifth in 2015. Jamie T closed his 2015 EP Magnolia Melancholia with a slow acoustic version. The upload in the hypersongs web is the official video, remastered in HD, with the album audio.