The punk rock movement exploded on both sides of the Atlantic in the second half of the 1970s, with its cultural impact spreading far beyond the world of music. An antidote to the self-serious meanderings of prog rock and reflecting the political zeitgeist of disillusioned and disenfranchised youth, the movement is still a reference point for all kinds of artists today.

Such is its legacy that pretty much all music produced since that is underpinned by distorted guitars, power chords and short, sharp melodies falls under the umbrella of “post-punk”. We can pinpoint roughly when punk ended and post-punk began, as the character of punk rock very much mirrored a typical song of the genre. It made a lot of noise, shook music to its foundations and caused plenty of offence, but was over almost as soon as it began.

From 1978 onwards, seminal punk bands either fell apart or branched out into more expansive musical territory. The movement continued underground, splitting into various subgenres which were pushed to the fringes of mainstream music.

But when did punk begin? Was the very first song that signalled, definitively, the beginning of a revolutionary musical movement? As with all movements, punk’s fluid and amorphous nature makes it difficult to isolate a single moment as its starting point. But given the human temptation to make order out of chaos, even in the case of a musical genre as necessarily chaotic as this one, we can at least approximate by demarcating the first song released, which was unmistakably punk.

That takes us back to October 1968, when Detroit garage rock band MC5 announced to the Grande Ballroom in their home city, “Right now, it’s time to kick out the jams, motherfuckers!” The band’s debut single ‘Kick Out the Jams’, with its wall of fuzz-guitar sound, straightforward, singular hook and electrifying tempo, was released in March 1969.

The song contained all of the ingredients that would come to define punk music. It stood out for its length, too, coming in at under three minutes, which was considerably shorter than the rest of the band’s output at the time.

Was this really the start of punk, though?

The MC5 were way ahead of their time. While fellow Detroit group The Stooges were likewise laying the groundwork for punk rock at the same time (and even being labelled with the term by certain music journalists), the two bands alone hardly constituted a movement.

What’s more, a lot of their songs didn’t really fit the bill of what we now consider punk rock. If we’re going to categorise ‘Kick Out the Jams’ as a punk song, why not go even further back to tracks released earlier in the 1960s that sounded similar? The Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ and ‘White Light/White Heat’ would surely fall into the same category.

As would The Kinks’ 1964 single ‘You Really Got Me’ or Them’s ‘Gloria’ from the same year. In fact, ‘Gloria’ was later recorded by one of the punk movement’s foremost progenitors, Patti Smith, in 1975. It can certainly make a great case for being the first punk song since it has the most explicitly punk rock song of any track on Smith’s debut album, Horses.

Even Smith’s version of the song is hard to define, however, as although it unquestionably contains elements of punk rock, it belongs to a tradition of avant-garde music, which is entirely at odds with the punk aesthetic as well. The track’s gradually increasing tempo, beginning at a walking pace before slowing building up to its rapid-fire climax, which reaches almost double the speed of Them’s original version, wouldn’t have made it onto later punk records. Strictly speaking, Smith’s ‘Gloria’ isn’t a punk rock song but half of one.

The first song we can label as punk rock without a shadow of a doubt arrived three months after Smith’s debut album. The Ramones single ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ was released in February 1976.

With its satirical redressing of 1950s rock and roll in Nazi clothing, breakneck rhythm, fuzz tones and shouts encouraging audience participation, it was the punk rock template for all other artists to follow. It beat other singles like ‘(I’m) Stranded’ by Australian punks The Saints and The Damned’s ‘New Rose’, the first British punk song, by several months.

Ramones are hardly the most surprising of candidates for the artist to have released the first punk rock song. But they’re certainly the least contentious.