The Ramones: The Ramones
I pretty much skipped punk rock in its day. What little I saw and heard of it didn’t much appeal to me—both the sound and the marketing imagery suggested flat, dull, monotonous. I didn’t even hear the Sex Pistols until sometime in the late ‘80s, when a younger co-worker lent me Never Mind the Bollocks. “I think you’re going to find this a bit of a letdown,” he said. “I guess it was something new at the time but now it just sort of sounds like bad heavy metal.” Yep.
But now and then someone tells me there really was something to the whole thing, and of course it became a major part of the pop music culture. So I’ve been trying to give myself a little education in the punk classics, and it doesn’t get much more punk and more classic than this album.
I can certainly see why, at a time when pompous and over-elaborate progressive rock shared the spotlight with dull country-folk rock (stigmatized for me by the term “mellow”) and vacant disco, the idea of going back to three chords and a cloud of dust (to borrow a football image) was both appealing and in fact needed. And I’m all for the do-it-yourself aspect of the punk movement, for encouraging people to make their own music without waiting to be spoon-fed by the radio (although of course the effect was mostly to have them spoon-fed by a different set of fashionable people, but that’s another story).
But I just don’t really like this album that much. I do get the joke, I think. I know the stupidity is deliberate. And it’s fun in small doses—four or five of these fourteen songs are extremely catchy and would be great to hear in the middle of a mix of more substantial stuff.
But there’s too much irony in it. It might seem strange to say that the problem with the Ramones is that they’re too artsy, but it’s true. The Ramones is almost a sort of conceptual art (starting with the stage names), less music than a statement about music, and a curiously flat one. The musical and emotional range is so deliberately limited that it begins to feel oppressive. This is a very short album (about 29 minutes), but I find it difficult to listen to the whole thing at once; to hear more than four or five songs in a row gives me a sense of unpleasant constriction.
I’ve read more than one tribute to the Ramones that goes on about how they restored rock-and-roll to its position in some extra-musical project, usually an incoherent desire for cultural revolution, which in turn is what rock-and-roll is “really about.” (Example from the liner notes of the Ramones anthology I’ve been listening to: “The four short lines of ‘Commando’…in one absurdist swoop obliterated the religio-jingoistic cold warspeak of the day.”)
Wrong. It’s about music, and the obscure rockers of the ‘50s and ‘60s who were claimed as inspiration for punk were making the best music of which they were capable, not dumbing themselves down as some sort of cultural statement. “96 Tears” may have been dumb but it wasn’t ironic. Although this music deliberately imitates certain aspects of the garage-rock sound that appeared in the mid-‘60s, its flattened emotional quality is totally different, and in that respect more truly a testimony to the atmosphere of the mid-‘70s than it was probably meant to be.
But I admit it probably would have been fun to be at this gig (CBGBs, 1977):
Although this song always leaves me wanting to hear “I Fought the Law.”
Pre-TypePad
Light On Dark Water 
Leave a comment