“Primal”: The frontwoman Joey Ramone adored
The history of punk is fittingly elusive. This genre of music, which is built upon rebellion and relies upon turbulence, doesn’t have a fixed moment upon which it started; rather, many different bands, artists, and artistic movements, in general, have all contributed to it. However, there is no escaping the fact that The Ramones played a huge part in the formation of punk music.
Many fans of rock and punk music consider them one of the most important bands in the world. Their sound wasn’t the only factor contributing to punk music; their overall attitude was also a huge contributor. They relied heavily on distortion, and their gigs were chaotic and carnage. These ripples impacted all other punk bands who came after them.
Whether they are the originators of the movement remains up for grabs. While they possessed all of the qualities we now recognise as being essential for any punk band, the political and societal part of the movement didn’t come until the Sex Pistols took to the stage some years later.
Despite the debate, Joey Ramone will always be adamant that his band started the movement, and any ideas to the contrary are non-starters. “I think for the most part people know now,” he said, “Joe Strummer says it was the Ramones first album that all the bands wanted to sound like. So it’s nice to hear things like that. Yeah, I think people in the know recognise the Ramones as the originators of the whole thing.”
Ramone was never shy about heaping praise onto himself and his fellow bandmates. “There’s nobody as good as the Ramones, never will be,” he said, “I mean everybody’s just emulated us and now everybody just kinda takes our sound as their foundations.”
The main thing that The Ramones wanted to achieve, both with their sound but also in the way they acted, was to be recognised as individuals. They wanted people to hear a song or see a clip of a performance and be able to recognise that it was The Ramones performing almost immediately. Credit where it’s due; they certainly did that, and they inspired a number of other artists who came after them as a result.
Of course, given they look for individuality in their own performance, they also want to find something similar in the other people they watch. For this reason, they were never too excited when they saw someone blatantly trying to copy their style. Instead, they wanted artists to learn from them and adopt their own completely unique style and sound as a whole. The most important thing was that artists had some form of edge to them.
Joey Ramone was a big fan of Courtney Love for this reason, as he could see the individuality in her performance. “I see music today as more of a business than ever before. When I was a kid growing up in the ‘60s, music was an outlet for enlightenment, frustration rebellion. It was more about individualism. Today it’s just like a big business,” he said, “There are some really good bands out there. I guess my favourite new band is Hole. I find [Courtney Love] to be totally unpredictable and primal, kind of spiritual, and she’s just herself, she’s not buying into all the [expletive].”
