Pavement’s ‘No More Kings’ Is The Perfect Protest Anthem for No Kings Day

All over America today, it’s No Kings Day, as the people rise up to make the kind of protests none of us thought we’d ever need to make in our lifetimes. It’s a day for defiance, for solidarity, as we watch the whole idea of a constitutional republic get dismantled piece by piece — not just by one man, but by a regime, an entire political party that no longer even pretends to have a platform, committed to the abolition of American democracy.

So what better day to blast Pavement? “No More Kings” is an eccentric deep cut that nonetheless has turned into an accidentally perfect protest song for our times. “I want no more kings!” Stephen Malkmus yells. “No more kings!” He’s singing about King George III of England in 1776, but somehow, it’s the anthem we need right now. 

The Nineties indie pranksters in Pavement cut “No More Kings” for a 1996 tribute album devoted to Schoolhouse Rock, the Seventies educational kiddie-TV shorts that ran during the Saturday-morning cartoons. “No More Kings” was a history lesson written and sung in 1975 by future Broadway legend Lynn Ahrens, who’d go on to win a Tony Award for Ragtime. It tells the story of the American Revolution, when the colonists rose up to rebel against the British Empire, leading to the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. 

But Pavement remade it in their own gloriously ramshackle way, goosing it with new melodies and rowdy band interaction. When Malkmus drawls, “That’s what I call taxation without representation, and that’s not fair,” Bob Nastanovich really loses his shit, screaming, “It’s wrong! It’s WRONG!” There’s also a hilarious moment where the music stops and you can hear Malkmus turn the page of his lyric sheet.

“Essentially, it was pick a song from the fantastic Schoolhouse Rock era,” Bob Nastanovich recalled in 2023 on the podcast In Loving Recollection. “We loved the song. I mean, ‘No More Kings’—if we were one of the first to choose, it was sort of an obvious one for us.” 

The original was a perky folk-pop ditty that sums up the events of the Revolution, like the Boston Tea Party. “He even had the nerve to tax our cup of tea!” the song goes. “To put it kindly, King, we really don’t agree.” But Pavement tweak it into a gorgeously shaggy guitar ramble. At the end, where the original has the sunny promise “we’re gonna run things our own way,” Malkmus adds a sly twist. “We’re gonna run our things our own way! We’re gonna run it into the ground!” Now there’s an American credo.

Pavement cut it in Memphis at the Pacific Trim sessions, with just the threesome of Malkmus, Nastanovich, and drummer Steve West, fresh from their long Crooked Rain tour. The studio time was booked for a Silver Jews album, but David Berman lasted just a couple hours before hopping in his car and driving home to Charlottesville. So the Pavement trio used the time to whip up a brilliant quickie EP, plus “No More Kings.” All three were big history buffs — at UVA, Malkmus majored in history and Nastanovich in government. 

“No More Kings” is totally in the spirit of Pavement, with their Nineties irreverence, as a band of riot-grrrl-adjacent punk boys. At a 2010 reunion show on the Brooklyn waterfront, Malkmus got one of the night’s biggest cheers when he said, “We saw a Bikini Kill show around here in 1992.” “Greenlander,” one of their best songs ever, was their contribution to the classic pro-choice benefit Born To Choose, a quintessential rock project of the era. As a Bernie Sanders supporter and Chapo Trap House fan, Malkmus told Rolling Stone, “Back in the Nineties, it was a little bit vague, and I would just kind of vote for whoever was the left-est reasonable candidate by the time the election happened.” 

In a 2010 interview, Stephen Colbert asked Pavement, “Do you have a musical hero? Somebody that if they didn’t exist, you wouldn’t be rocking?” Malkmus quipped, “Reagan?” He wasn’t kidding — Nineties rock culture was shaped by the end of the Reagan-Bush regime, a twelve-year nightmare from which young America was desperate to awake. (On Election Night 1992, as my wife and I watched the invincible George H.W. Bush go down to defeat, the first record we put on to celebrate was “Debris Slide,” from the 10-inch Perfect Sound Forever.) What is “No More Kings” but a very Pavement declaration of independence?

Schoolhouse Rock had a phenomenal body of kiddie pop tunes — it’s the reason why Gen Xers can all sing the preamble to the Constitution, or tell you all about conjunctions. The cartoon vignettes ran every Saturday morning on ABC, in between classic kids’ shows like Hong Kong Phooey, Scooby Doo, The Krofft Supershow, and Uncle Croc’s Block. But most of all, Schoolhouse Rock got the music right, with jazz hepcats like Bob Dorough and Blossom Dearie. There was Multiplication Rock, with math lessons like the De La Soul-inspiring “Three Is a Magic Number.” Grammar Rock had classic odes to adjectives, nouns, and interjections, which show excitement and emotion. “No More Kings” came from America Rock, like the legislative explainer “I’m Just a Bill,” the Nineteenth Amendment feminist banger “Sufferin’ Till Suffrage,” and the timely celebration of immigrants, “The Great American Melting Pot.” 

The 1996 tribute Schoolhouse Rock! Rocks revived these songs in new versions by Biz Markie, Blind Melon, The Lemonheads, Moby, Skee-Lo, even Ween. But the obvious keeper was Pavement’s “No More Kings,” which came out as a 7-inch single. “It is what it is, kinda jokey,” Nastanovich said. “But that was the vibe, that sort of silliness. Obviously, Schoolhouse Rock was meant to be an effective, fun way to learn. So that was a pretty easy thing for us to pull off.” Malkmus took it somewhere different. “As he went through that process of siphoning it from a ditty to a Pavement song, he essentially—as he did with a lot of things—he just Malkmus’d it.”

They always approached everything in their own playful way — as seen in the excellent new semi-demi-quasi documentary Pavements, director Alex Ross Perry’s send-up/celebration of a band whose story couldn’t be told any other way.  They brought that mischievous wit to American history, whether it was Cotton Mather (“Give It a Day,” from Pacific Trim), or “Unseen Power of the Picket Fence,” an ode to R.E.M. that bizarrely that bizarrely turns into General Sherman marching through Georgia. (“G-G-G-G-G-Georgia!”)

All three of the Pavement dudes at this session had deep Virginia ties, which explains why they had so much fun playing up the “taxation without representation” line — it was a resonant local reference, to the then-burning issue of Washington, D.C. statehood. The district had federal taxes yet no representation in Congress — a vexed issue for a mostly-Black city, inevitably tied in with the issue of Puerto Rican statehood. D.C. even introduced “Taxation Without Representation” license plates, which Bill Clinton put on the presidential limo. (George W. Bush had them removed.) 

But when they banged out “No More Kings,” they definitely weren’t envisioning a future that looked like this — nobody did. They never pictured a moment when the White House would send in the National Guard and the Marines to invade a U.S. city and round up immigrants. (The city’s name is “Los Angeles,” a todo esto.) The reckless ICE attacks on immigrant workers have been just one symptom of the Republican regime’s war on America and the people who live in it. Trump, in office only five months, has checked off practically every item on the Declaration of Independence’s list of George III’s “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”  As the Declaration put it: “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

“No More Kings” is a Seventies story that Pavement updated for the Nineties, yet one that sounds absolutely in the spirit of right now. The idea of “No More Kings” doesn’t sound like ancient history these days, the way it did when they did this song in 1996. Here’s hoping it goes back to sounding that way sooner rather than later.