We're A Happy Family

I wish I could hear The Ramones for the first time again.

When you love music, when you think about it and react to it in a context beyond a binary "I like this" or "I don't like this" dichotomy, several things can happen. First, you tend to listen to a lot of it. And, if you're like me, you start to think of the music you hear as a running soundtrack to your life; songs, albums, and artists assume meanings that they generally don't need to in a world of disposable mass culture.

For example, consider the song "Swallowed," by Bush. Saying that this is Bush's best song (which it is) still doesn't mean that it's very good (which it isn't). The production is muddy and lumbering in a disturbing mid-1990s style. It uses the quietLOUDquietLOUD dynamic that Bush, and everyone else, copied from Nirvana, who copied it from the Pixies in the first place. Finally, the lyrics don't make any sense.

Even so, I love "Swallowed." I love it because I listened to that song dozens of times when I was sixteen and seventeen years old, and I loved being sixteen and seventeen years old, driving around Delton in my dad's Plymouth Aries, pining over girls I never got the courage to ask out, and playing music with my friends using the same quietLOUDquietLOUD dynamic that we copied from Nirvana. I felt out of place, for sure, but was beginning to realize that out of place was a legitimate place to be, and maybe even a preferable one.

At the time, I thought my life was barely better than it would be if I was growing up in a Charles Dickens novel, and one of his lesser works, at that. Later, though, I got older and became, according to my sister, "maudlin and nostalgic." Like any good older brother, my initial instinct was to go repeatedly punch a stuffed animal in my room after telling her to shut up. I remembered, however, a night a couple of months prior when I began feeling particularly nostalgic while sitting in a bar with my cousin. Oasis's "Don't Look Back In Anger" started playing, and I became consumed with a strange feeling of contentment tinged with sadness. Any hope that my feelings were just a result of mixing alcohol and a good song played loudly in a bar were dashed when "One Headlight" by The Wallflowers came on next and I nearly began to weep. This was nostalgia.

Which is all to say that music means a lot to me; I interact with it on a distinctly personal level. It informs who I am, how I view myself, and how I see the world and my place in it. This is where The Ramones come in.

The Ramones were specifically engineered to mean something to their audience. The early punk bands were like that; a large part of their appeal was that they were reflections of the people who came to the shows, and vice versa. I once foolishly claimed in a public forum that The Sex Pistols were "completely manufactured," but that's not true of them anymore than it is of any band with some ambition and a manager. By any objective standard, The Ramones, who assumed names and dressed alike throughout their career, were as manufactured as The Sex Pistols, if not more so.

I can understand that a certain kind of person, upon hearing The Ramones, is liable to wonder what the big deal is. The music sounds simple, even primitive. Joey's voice sounds weird and alien; it's not surprising that this music didn't make Top 40 radio listeners salivate, even now that punk rock has broken through to the mainstream. I am the opposite kind of person. For me, hearing "Blitzkrieg Bop" for the first time at thirteen years old was something akin to being born again. It was music made for misfits by misfits, and liking it was a way of proudly acknowledging your misfit status. For me, being a Ramones fan meant that I didn't have to apologize for who I was or what music I liked. There's no logical reason for this; it's just what the music gave me, or brought out in me.

It was only years after that first romance with the music of the Ramones that I learned that despite their image as a bunch of leather jacketed brothers in arms, intrepidly marching on despite their lack of commercial success or mainstream recognition, Johnny and Joey hated each other and barely spoke for the last fifteen years of the band's existence. Instead of feeling like it was all a big farce, I had an enhanced respect for them. They knew what The Ramones meant, to their fans and to themselves. It couldn't have been easy to drive around the country, year after year, in a van with guys you don't like. But they did it, because everyone needs a place to belong, and people to belong with, even misfits.