There were many chants at the anti-Trump demonstration outside Downing Street on Monday night, but one was particularly satisfying. It has a bracing staccato energy, like a weaponised cheerleader chant, and it has already been heard at protests across the US: “No Trump! No KKK! No fascist USA!” Try it. It feels good.

The chant’s popularity took off at the American Music awards last November, 12 days after the US election. Midway through a furious performance of their single Bang Bang, the politically minded band Green Day broke the song down to a tense dirge and frontman Billie Joe Armstrong barked the chant six times. “We didn’t rehearse it,” he said later. “We’re just as much in shock as everybody else is about this.” He also clarified that the chant originated more than 30 years earlier with the band MDC.

When Green Day started out in Berkeley’s famously militant Gilman Street punk scene, they were schooled in the canon of hardcore punk. One of the most radical bands they met there was MDC, based in San Francisco but originally from Austin, Texas. In the band’s hometown in 1980, the Ku Klux Klan was harassing Latino farmworkers while trying to recruit new members at punk shows, much as the National Front did in Britain. The punk scene’s resistance to the Klan inspired the band, then called the Stains, to write a frantic two-minute tirade called Born to Die, with the blurted chant: “No war! No KKK! No fascist USA!” It was rerecorded for MDC’s 1982 debut album Millions of Dead Cops, a hardcore punk classic.

All together now … anti-Trump demonstrators outside Downing Street on Monday night. Photograph: Tom Nicholson/Rex/Shutterstock

Slowed down and tightened up, the chant became a fixture at protests for years to come. Frontman Dave Dictor said that he heard it during demonstrations against the Gulf war in 1991 and again 12 years later. A specific retort to Texan Klansmen in 1980 had proved extremely flexible. When Green Day updated it to name Trump (as MDC themselves do on tour), the millions watching the AMAs didn’t need to know their punk history to appreciate the message. On 10 January, protesters shouted it while disrupting the confirmation hearings for proposed attorney general Jeff Sessions, a man with a history of opposing civil rights.

It is rare for a chant to eclipse the song that originally contained it, although it happened most famously with the Plastic Ono Band’s Give Peace a Chance. While the recorded version is ramshackle and plodding, the chorus became ubiquitous as a refrain at demonstrations.

Even after the Green Day performance, Born to Die isn’t one of MDC’s most popular tracks on Spotify but the chant is unquestionably their most well-known lyric. Asked by Rolling Stone why it resonated so strongly after so long, Dictor couldn’t say: “I think it’s just a good line that captures what we want,” he replied. Sometimes one good line can be a band’s most potent legacy.