By Sullivan Fall
April 2001
From what I can tell, it looks like the seventies sucked before the Ramones. Rock and Roll had gotten soft in the California sun, too many albums being made in condos instead of basements (sure, the Stooges were kicking around some gutter in L.A., but no one was listening to them except for Lester Bangs and David Bowie). The Ramones took back the beat from the coke-snorting headcases that never got over the sham that was the Sixties. The Eagles were singing "Take it Easy"; The Ramones were singing "I Wanna Sniff Some Glue." The happy drugs weren't working in the urban decay of New York. The big fat lie that was the American Dream was lost on the Ramones: politics was a waste (revealed by Watergate), the family was as screwed up as any other institution (the parodic name). They sang about being bored and stupid and poor. About having something to say but not knowing how to say it. About being a freak in the land where beauty gets you ahead. The Ramones sang for the unseemly: the ones who didn't get girlfriends, the ones who couldn't afford college, the ones who had nothing to look forward to except being stuck in the same place you grew up. They sang "I'm Against It" because everything that they had been told was a lie. Nothing really changes in America, and the Ramones knew it. They were young people who realized that there isn't really anything to look forward to. They were always the scum that nice people didn't want to see. The world made no sense, it was only there to criticize you. The Ramones were screaming at a world that they couldn't get at, a world that attempts to make the uninitiated feel wrong for being uninitiated. That's why so many of their songs were about mental illness and treatments (as well as supposedly Joey's bio): are we going insane (as the world tells us if we are not acceptable to its standards) or is the world insane and we're normal? The Ramones always demanded that the truth be acknowledged, that the ugliness be seen. They did it with humor and energy and a surprisingly solid basis that was rarely manipulated by the preening fashion dictated by the corporate factory. They allowed themselves to be laughed at for their inadequacies while still, occasionally, hoping there is something out there worth the effort. For all their supposed nihilism, they wanted something to be true, to be beautiful. The Ramones were too good to be popular. They were too honest for m.o.r. radio. But for some of us, they were totally for real. Thank you Joey Ramone, for being a part of the band that kicked the truth back into rock and roll.