The punk band Billy Corgan thinks are far “bigger than the Ramones”
With a run time barely ever exceeding two minutes, punk pioneers the Ramones rewrote the rules of rock ‘n’ roll with their fast, raw, and relentlessly energetic sound.
Patti Smith once remarked in a 1978 interview that “every new wave band owes half their heart to the Ramones”, and to be honest, she wasn’t exaggerating, as from The Clash to Nirvana, nearly everyone who picked up a guitar in the decades that followed felt the ghostly hands of Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy on their shoulders.
But for Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, it’s his old friends Green Day who have eclipsed the Ramones in terms of cultural impact.
Corgan first met Billie Joe Armstrong and co back in 1994 at Lollapalooza, a chaotic summer during which he recalled, “They used to laugh at me when I would play basketball against the monks, and snicker like the punks they are”.
Corgan spoke about Green Day in a 2024 interview with Rolling Stone, talking about the moment he saw them getting their Hollywood Walk of Fame star, which led him to an illuminating realisation about the band’s trajectory, “I had this moment where I was reminiscing and I was like, ‘Wow, I’ve known these guys for over 30 years, and we just did this tour. Oh my God, they’re bigger than the Ramones’.”
When you drop a statement as explosive as that, you’ve got to explain your side of things, which the frontman did as he said, “What I mean by that is that in the world I grew up in, the Ramones were number one. In a way, they always will be number one because they were first. But then I realised, ‘Oh my God, Green Day has actually done it. They are bigger than the Ramones’. Their influence is greater, their reach is greater, and certainly their success is greater. And that’s all power to them. I’m late to that party at 58 years old, and I’ve known them and watched them and listened to them and been a competitor, right? But even I have to go, ‘Wow, they’ve done it’.”
Of course, no band exists in isolation; punk music is a sprawling, multi-generational genre, a tangled web that stretches, in this writer’s opinion, all the way back to Woody Guthrie, who first made the guitar political when he scrawled “This machine kills fascists” across the frame of his.
From Guthrie’s protest songs to the snarling bite of the Sex Pistols in ’76, the experimental pulse of post-punk under Thatcher in ’79, and onward to Green Day’s arena-filling anthems, each era has returned to haunt the next. It’s a kind of musical hauntology of riffs, frustration, and energy lingering across decades, shaping the bands that follow.
Green Day may have outgrown the Ramones in commercial reach and album sales, but they are also undeniably their derivative, and perhaps that is the paradox at the heart of music history: you can surpass your predecessors, reach bigger stages, sell more records, and touch more fans, but only because those who came before cleared the stage.
