On a beach in Mexico, the Minutemen awoke to pain. They had spent the previous day swimming for hours along Rosarito Beach. Now, on the morning of Mexico’s 1982 election, the three punks were hungover and sunburnt, their newly shaved heads red and raw. Before decamping to a taqueria, they watched a woman make her way up and down the beach, collecting empty beer bottles to deposit for cash.

Struck by the display of poverty and desperation—all contrasted with scenes of beachside revelry—lead singer and guitarist D. Boon wrote “Corona,” a deceptively jaunty tune with a Norteño flavor. It’s the song that best epitomizes the trio’s spirit of freewheeling musical curiosity, cross-cultural fascination, and radical class solidarity, even if a younger generation associates it with guys on TV piercing their butt cheeks and shitting in display toilets.

Though they played with a funk-infused virtuosity that set them apart from the hardcore scene in which they moved, the Minutemen took pains to stress that they were just three regular dudes from San Pedro, a blue-collar outpost of Los Angeles. Childhood friends Boon and Mike Watt, along with their drummer, George Hurley, came from working-class families and held day jobs throughout the band’s existence. For Boon, a history buff liable to spout off about the English Civil War or U.S. involvement in El Salvador, the personal was always political; the singer worked at an auto parts store and channeled his loathing of a racist boss into the defiant “This Ain’t No Picnic,” one of many Minutemen songs instilled with a sense of egalitarian agitation. The group’s songs were short—usually under two minutes—but crammed with invectives against the ruling class (“The Only Minority”), mass marketing (“Shit From an Old Notebook”), and American imperialist greed (“Untitled Song for Latin America”), all filtered through an erudite wit.

Amid an era of Reagan-sanctioned greed, the Minutemen prized frugality, toured on the cheap, and “jammed econo.” They recorded their greatest work, 1984’s Double Nickels on the Dime, a 45-song opus of endless invention, for just $1,100. They conceived of art as a vehicle for working-class liberation; they believed in music by and for the common man. “One of our philosophies in the Minutemen has to do with, there should be more interaction with music and everyday people,” Boon said in a 1985 interview. “Cuz that’s what we are.” To that end, they dressed like regular joes, not rock royalty, and when Boon booked local bands at a San Pedro theater, he preferred shows to start early so working people could attend and still get up for their jobs in the morning.

Double Nickels on the Dime was a post-hardcore album in the literal sense: It was the album the Minutemen made after they’d mastered hardcore and set out to conquer every other genre, too. Across its four sides, and alongside the band’s trademark spiky punk paroxysms, Double Nickels offered jittery funk (“Theatre Is the Life of You”), spoken-word self-mythologizing (“History Lesson – Part II”), wacky Beefheart-ian diversions (“You Need the Glory”), tongue-in-cheek acoustic balladry (“Take 5, D”), and scrappy covers of Steely Dan and Creedence favorites. All three Minutemen contributed songwriting, and each member programmed a distinct side of the double-LP.

Written by Boon (but selected by Watt), “Corona” stands as one of the album’s most audacious genre experiments. Boon was never your typical punk guitarist, favoring funk flourishes and a dry, trebly tone, but here he seizes our attention with a flamboyant, ringing chord overture reminiscent of regional Mexican music. Hurley, an uncommonly versatile drummer, anchors the song with a cheerful polka rhythm, and Watt rises to the occasion with a polka-style oom-pah oom-pah bassline. For a protest song, it has a strangely jubilant tone, as Boon sings about the perseverance and survival of the lower classes: “The people will survive/In their environment/The dirt, scarcity, and the emptiness/Of our South.”

The second verse, in which Boon invokes “the injustice of our greed,” gestures at a recurring theme in Minutemen songs: the international consequences of American capitalism and imperialist cruelty. (The same trip across the border inspired the Watt-penned “I Felt Like a Gringo,” a 1983 song that describes sleeping in “American trash” on a Mexican beach.) Not until the third verse does Boon mention the sorrow and desperation of the woman on the beach, and his measly contribution to her earnings: “I only had a Corona,” he sings. “Five-cent deposit.” Then comes a reprisal of the opening riff. While playing this outro live, Boon liked to hop wildly across the stage, like a wild-eyed punk attempting to line-dance.

Of course, thanks to its eventual use as the Jackass theme song, the instantly recognizable guitar riff is all most listeners know of “Corona.” Fans of the show, which premiered 15 years after Boon’s death, have no reason not to think it’s an instrumental. The song’s strange journey from double-album deep cut to theme music for MTV dirtbags doing unspeakable things with a Porta Potty provides a neat microcosm for the commodification of punk in the years following Boon’s untimely death. By the early aughts, pop-punk was big business, and young bands sought major-label deals with a shameless zeal that could bring glory, peril, or both. Jamming econo had fallen out of favor.

It’s heartening, though, to learn that Watt happily sanctioned Jackass’s use of “Corona,” in part because he was a fan of Spike Jonze’s work, and in part because he wanted Boon’s music to be heard widely. “He can’t do gigs,” Watt told the author Michael T. Fournier in 2006. “He can’t be here to tell you about this stuff, and I can’t do a good enough job for him.” Enter Johnny Knoxville.

The money generated by the song’s licensing reportedly went to Boon’s father, a Navy veteran who used the funds for emphysema treatment. The Minutemen believed in punk music that served the working man; in a crueler world than the one they envisioned, the improbable afterlife of “Corona” helped at least one.