Hear Me Out: The Ramones were the first pop-punk band
How did you get into punk rock? The way that some people talk about it, one day they were bopping along to The Backstreet Boys before a chance encounter with the Ramones‘ debut album changed their lives overnight. They looked up, and their 12-year-old hair had been scraped up into liberty spikes. Torn, skintight Levis adorned their legs, and they could start a seething mosh pit in a deserted Tesco. Any encounter with the dreaded scourge known as pop-punk was entirely by accident.
To the terminally punx, pop-punk is the antithesis of the entire genre. It’s worse than manufactured boy bands because, at the very least, BTS aren’t trying to convince you they’ve ever been near a hardcore all-dayer at the Camden Black Heart. The likes of Green Day, Blink-182, Sum-41 and The Offspring are the true enemy because they took the soul of punk rock and made it palatable to mainstream tastes. The lot of them mere Judas-es who made off with a whole lot more than 30 pieces of silver jingling in their artfully ripped, £300 leather jackets.
What absolutely none of them will tell you is that the vast, vast majority of those hipsters didn’t start out their journey into punk with GG Allin bootlegs and Show Me The Body mixtapes. They started out as die-hard fans of those pop-punk bands that came before. What’s more, there’s nothing wrong with that because there’s nothing wrong with pop-punk. In fact, some of the best punk rock has come from pop-punk bands.
After all, there are two sides to punk rock, aren’t there? There’s the side that favours simplicity and the side that favours aggression. Honestly, the early punk bands favour the latter far more than the former. The Stooges gave the world punk’s aggressive, noisy energy (not to mention its fascination with bleeding lead singers). Never forget that they did so over guitar solos and in their early 1970s heyday, and extended avant-garde jazz saxophone breakdowns.
Which band personified the simplicity of punk rock?
The simplicity of punk rock came as a reaction to the pompous hard rock and prog rock bands of the day. Outfits like Yes, Emerson, Lake, & Palmer and Led Zeppelin (you heard me) needlessly lording their instrumental chops over arenas of bored hippies for the sake of showing off. While one side of punk rock took that progressive edge and ran with it, the other was a reaction to it. Stripping everything back to the bare essentials of rock ‘n’ roll. Energy, attitude and great fucking songs.
There was one band that did this better than just about any other band. Whose tunes were short, sharp rabbit punches of raucous noise, yet cut with pure pop songwriting. Phenomenal melodies, simple chord sequences, and, in more than a few cases, even butter wouldn’t melt sweetness at the heart of their lyrics. If this were any other band, they would be a pop-punk band through and through. Which is exactly what the Ramones are, but when you say that, a bunch of bullet-belted melts with names like Grotlicker get really pissy with you.
Why are Ramones a pop-punk band?
Now, each Ramone was as much a fan of pure pop music as anyone, although it’s difficult to say whether a soul as fundamentally bastard-shaped as Johnny Ramone’s had time for anything so pure. After all, the band were named by bassist Douglas Colvin after discovering that Paul McCartney used to check into hotels under the name Paul Ramon. Inspired, he took up the name Dee-Dee Ramone and encouraged the band to take up the same surname.
It’s telling that the group weren’t just inspired by The Beatles, but specifically by the cute, poppy Beatle who wrote ‘All My Loving’ and ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. However, their true heart was and forever will be their singer, Joey Ramone. A man who fronted Ramones because he couldn’t be in The Shirelles. His obsession with the songwriting of classic 1960s girl groups powered the band’s own and led him to create similarly ecstatic pop classics that just so happened to be played by one of the world’s loudest rock bands.
It was in his voice, too. The man couldn’t howl like Iggy Pop or screech like The New York Dolls’ David Johansen, so he sang. If you asked a lot of people at the time, they’d say he couldn’t do that either. Yet his soft, crooning baritone is the beating heart of every Ramones song—from butter wouldn’t melt classics like ‘I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend’ to outright, full-steam-ahead ramalamas like ‘Teenage Lobotomy’. What’s more, it suits them too because all Ramones songs, at every level of heaviness, are built around solid gold hooks that suit a singer like Joey much more than any other punk singer of that time.
Put simply, they are a pop-punk band because every single definition of the term should include the New York legends. Pop songs given a punk makeover? Ramones. Punk rock bangers with catchy choruses? Yep, Ramones suit that too. Hell, their look even suits the term. Like any pop group worth their salt, you can recognise them by their silhouette. Yet to this day, the band still look utterly out-there and even a little intimidating.
The only way you can not define Ramones as a pop-punk band is if you inherently define pop-punk as “bad music”. If that’s the case, then sure, I’ll let you live like ‘American Idiot’ didn’t change your life and leave you to your sad little existence, bullying newcomers to punk rock out of the scene. In the meantime, ‘Sheena Is a Punk Rocker’ just tore up the dancefloor, but you’d have no interest in that, right?
