extablisment

Pg. 3

 

IF you thought The Bay City Rollers and whomever else in the New York 70's leather-wearing feathered-hair teenage pop-rock cliques were not as groundbreaking as they felt in 1974, and IF you did in fact see The BCR or The New York Dolls as fun freedom-loving revolutionary radical rock and rollers at the start and you had no understanding of the larger music world you inhabited, then sure, The Ramones might have inspired you as well.  For the rest of us The Ramones seemed to be a one-joke band that got stale like bread by the third day.

 

2. Simple is catchy!  So is "Don't Worry Be Happy" by Bobby McFerrin.  In fact, Bobby McFerrin is ight years better than The Ramones and he conducts orchestras too.   See, simple also makes for a one-hit wonder and that's about it in a better world than ours. One simple song or two, catchy pop song, whatever, everyone knows those work.

 

But when you then write SIX HUNDRED dumb simple songs that all sound the same then it is not charming, it is just a case of arrested development at that point.  Simple is good only when you can show it was a CHOICE to be simple.  The Simple Jacks of the music world, The Ramones, didn't choose to be simple as much as they just WERE simple and called it a choice.They never developed anything new or noteworthy after their first breakthrough as champions of stupidity.

 

3. The Lyrics:

Oh, God, it burns!  Just trying to find some of the crap to use as representative samples has singed my retinas.  With eyes closed, I selected some random samples of some of the stupidest words ever committed to tape in the history of man and womankind. Note that they no worse that a lot of juvenile pop and corny schmaltz of the early rock and roll era... but also no better despite attempting satire):

 

"We're gonna have a real cool time
Girl you know you're always in my mind
(Repeat over and over again until death claims your be-numbed mind).

 

"I need you baby, that I just can't hide

I miss you honey when it's cold outside, oh yeah"
(repeat, rinse, repeat, vomit, repeat)

 

4. Of course, only the dumbest jackass white boys of the 80s tried to rap, and here was a Ramones' earth-shaking attempt:

 

"I like what i'm doing and i'm having fun 
Here's some advice for everyone
Try to make the most out of every day
And remember that drugs don't pay!"

 

Wow, amazing.  Such rhyme, so flow.  Stunning anti-social commentary and a rich challenge to the hedgemony of commerical pop music, right?  But for satire to work we have to think that the author could do better if they wanted to and they are simply holding a mirror up to an existing ignorance via parroting it; when Dee Dee tried to seriously write music or rap it was indistinguishable from his past supposedly bad on purpose satirical lyrics, so what are we to think?  Probably that this shtick was about all they had and they became what they had mocked rather too quickly when the joke got old.

 

5. Rock and Roll High School.  Pet Cemetery.  All the great soundtracks!  

Ha ha ha.

 

6. Look at all the lousy dumbasses they seemingly inspired!

 

When lowest common denominator stupidity wins because its funny and when the whole system is mocked without any redeeming feature then we all eventually end up debased as well.  The Ramones' message was: "you're stupid, pop music is stupid, we are stupid, its funny 'cause its so pathetic." And that's also how we wound up with more bad bands being seeded by The Ramones than any other single lousy fucking band in the history of the world other than the Velveeta Underground.  

 

Well, Fuck you, Jeffrey Ross Hyman, you're a fucking clown. There are worse things in the world, I shouldn't get too worked up over it, and there are some great clowns out there too who do good work (I don't want to piss off the clown contingent, they could come at me with a lot of rubber hoses!), but I don't find The Ramones are better than one hit wonder.  

 

TL; DR In the short run we as a culture too often elevate what has been said to be popular (a self-reinforcing downward spiral) rather than what is good; hope in the long run we learn).

 

Bottom Line: I understand that you can't argue with the supposed popularity of any of the "successful" bands which I rake over the coals. They must have done something right, eh?  I also understand that sometimes a band's craft (such as it is) might be fairly tight and thus able to capture an audience in its own way.  Well, Milli Vanilli "worked" too for awhile. 

 

Popularity is not the only measure of taste. Sometimes, like the Black Eyed Peas' "My Humps", something succeeds in the short term because of  the stupidity. So... that just makes bands like The Ramones one hit wonders not worth the adulation they've received in the past.

 

P.S.

The only bands or musicians which are worse than The Ramones might be the slew of bad rappers or others who promote violence, misogyny or crass kinds of stupidity in their music (including death metal, etc etc). We'll rip them a new one soon enough as well.

 

Nonetheless, if you've made it this far it means you have nothing better to do and are wasting your time reading funny stuff on the internet.  So.... here's an example of a band of clowns who are actually funny...Enjoy!

 

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/file/foo-fighters-rider-11?page=1

 

--Kevin Salveson