The 1970s File Feature
Kick It Out
Kick It Out — Heart's Hard Rock Statement Seattle's Most Dangerous Sisters Hit Their Stride By the end of 1977, Heart had established themselves as one of th…
01 The Story
Kick It Out — Heart's Hard Rock Statement
Seattle's Most Dangerous Sisters Hit Their Stride
By the end of 1977, Heart had established themselves as one of the most compelling rock bands in North America, distinguished from almost every act in their genre by the fact that they were fronted, and to a large extent driven, by two women. Ann and Nancy Wilson had pushed through the barriers of rock radio and arena booking with genuine artistic authority, not by softening the hard rock format but by mastering it and infusing it with their own sensibility. Kick It Out arrived in November 1977, from their second album Little Queen, as a compact, aggressive statement of everything that made Heart matter.
Little Queen had been released earlier that year to substantial critical and commercial success, following up their breakthrough debut Dreamboat Annie with an album that doubled down on heavy guitar textures and Ann Wilson's extraordinary vocal range. The album featured "Barracuda," one of the defining hard rock tracks of the decade, and "Kick It Out" was another facet of the same diamond: fast, physical, rhythmically insistent.
The Sound of the Track
The recording is built on a tight, driving rhythm section with Nancy Wilson's guitar work creating the propulsive texture that carries Ann's vocals. Nancy Wilson's guitar contributions on Little Queen were central to the album's aggressive energy; she was not merely accompanying her sister's vocal performances but generating the sonic architecture that made them possible. The interplay between the guitars, the rhythm section, and Ann's voice on Kick It Out reflects a band that had developed into a genuinely cohesive unit through extensive touring and recording.
The arrangement is lean, without the orchestral textures or acoustic passages that Heart deployed on other material. This is rock music in its more stripped-down mode: drums, guitars, bass, and a voice that could cut through all of it without effort. The production serves the energy of the performance rather than polishing it into something more radio-friendly. That quality distinguishes it from the softer material that would characterize Heart's commercial renaissance in the 1980s.
Chart Performance in Late 1977
The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on November 26, 1977 at position 84, improved to its peak of 79 on December 3, 1977, and held that position for a second week before exiting. The three-week chart run reflects the single's role as an album track promotion rather than a primary commercial release. Little Queen as an album was performing strongly, and Kick It Out served the purpose of keeping the band present on radio while the album continued to sell.
In the competitive hard rock landscape of late 1977, a top-80 Hot 100 placement for what was essentially an album track in the B-tier of the release strategy represented solid performance. The track's core audience was the arena rock constituency that Heart had been building through relentless touring rather than the mainstream pop radio audience that drove top-20 placement.
Heart in the Arena Rock Era
Understanding Kick It Out requires some sense of what the arena rock world looked like in 1977. Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Foreigner, and Boston were defining the genre's commercial parameters. Heart had joined this company with remarkable speed after Dreamboat Annie, and their continued success depended on convincing a largely male rock audience that Ann and Nancy Wilson belonged in the same conversation as the genre's established male acts. That argument was made through performances like Kick It Out, which offered no concessions to any expectation of feminine softness: it was as aggressive and confident as anything else in the genre.
The willingness to match the genre on its own terms, rather than carve out a softer adjacent space, was central to Heart's artistic identity in this period and to their significance in rock history.
A Footnote That Earns Its Place
In the Heart catalog, Kick It Out occupies the position of an honored supporting player: not the famous track from Little Queen, but one that demonstrates the album's consistent quality and the band's range within the hard rock format. For listeners who know Heart primarily through their 1980s mainstream period, discovering this track and the album that surrounds it is a reminder of how ferociously good this band was when they were at their hardest and most uncompromising. Let it play loud.
"Kick It Out" — Heart's singular moment on the 1970s charts.
02 Song Meaning
Kick It Out — The Authority of Refusal
Saying No With Force
Hard rock has always been, at some fundamental level, about power: the power of volume, of physical rhythm, of a voice that commands attention. Kick It Out focuses that power on a particular kind of interpersonal declaration, one of refusal and expulsion. The title frames an act of ejection, of removing something unwanted from your space with force and finality. Heart delivers this message not with anger's fragility but with rock music's characteristic assertiveness, the confidence of people who know exactly what they want and what they will not tolerate.
Gender and the Hard Rock Framework
One of the most significant things about Kick It Out, and about Heart's work in this period generally, is the way Ann Wilson's vocal performance inhabits the hard rock framework without modification. The genre had been almost entirely male in its practitioners and in its assumed audience; Heart's success challenged both of those assumptions simultaneously. A track like this one, aggressive and uncompromising in its attitude, performed by a female vocalist with a voice that could compete with the genre's most powerful male counterparts, made a cultural argument simply by existing.
The lyrical posture of refusal and expulsion, common enough in rock generally, carries additional resonance when the voice delivering it is female. The woman who tells someone to leave, who has the authority and the force to back up that demand, was a less common figure in popular music than the woman who was left, who waited, or who mourned. Heart's catalog in this period consistently offered the alternative.
Energy as the Message
Instrumental music and music with simple, repetitive lyrics often communicate their essential meaning through sonic texture rather than semantic content. Kick It Out belongs to this tradition; a significant portion of what the track communicates is carried by the guitar tone, the rhythm section's locked-in drive, and the physical impact of the production. The energy itself is the argument. When the music sounds like something that cannot be stopped or contained, the lyric's declaration of expulsive authority is given physical backing.
This is what rock music does when it is working properly: it makes an abstract emotional or attitudinal statement feel physically real. The listener does not just understand that the narrator wants to kick something out; the listener feels the force behind that desire in their own body. That embodied communication is the genre's core competency, and Heart was operating at a high level of that competency in 1977.
The Legacy of the Little Queen Era
The late 1970s material that Heart produced before their 1980s pop turn is now recognized as some of the strongest hard rock of the era. Little Queen in particular holds up as a fully realized album with consistent quality and a clear artistic identity. Kick It Out, peaking at number 79 on the Billboard Hot 100 in December 1977, was a modest commercial result that understated the track's artistic contribution to the album and to the band's developing identity.
The song's themes, of power, of refusal, of the right to define one's own space, aged better than much of the era's more commercially successful hard rock. Revisiting it now, the track sounds less like a period piece than like a statement of permanent validity: some things need to be kicked out, and the force required to do so is not a failing but a virtue.
"Kick It Out" — Heart's singular moment on the 1970s charts.
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