If you asked me when I was younger, I’d probably say the Ramones were the coolest band that ever lived.
But coolness is a fragile beast. One day, three chords and a leather jacket are the ultimate signifiers of cool, the next it’s the passe phase of an out-of-touch try-hard.
It’s a shame, the fickleness of cool. The Ramones created a blueprint that has sustained and resonated for decades, rejecting the pretension, virtuosity, and endless overambition of the stadium and progressive rock acts of the 1970s that were just waiting to be blown away by the simple snarl of punk rock.
But the chatter about the band and their influence is now arguably at an all-time low.
About ten to fifteen years ago, the punk pioneers eating refried beans in Queens were everywhere. Nary a high street could be walked down without their instantly recognisable logo staring back. It even nestled sweetly in the cheap t-shirt section of Primark, selling among the Disney-licensed fare and Stewie Griffin graphic tees. Perhaps we might already be hitting the reason why the Ramones aren’t cool anymore.
It’s hard to gauge the amorphous cultural milieu with statistics and data and all the ways of hard evidence, so we’ll look at the band’s Google Trends to see how much general interest there has been over time.
Interest in the Ramones was highest in 2004, hitting an all-time peak spike when Johnny died late in that year. It makes sense that this would hit a post-heyday fever pitch following the guitarist’s death, particularly given the build-up from Joey’s death in 2001 and Dee Dee’s in 2002.
The major members of the Ramones died relatively young (Joey wouldn’t even hit the age of 50), and their deaths prompted a mass outpouring of grief – for their lives lost, their legacy, and to ensure the word of their immense influence and importance spread.
The Ramones, so revered and canonised now, were never ones to sell albums or have commercial or mainstream prominence, so the place that they hold now in the history of rock and punk rock was never assured. Acts just as influential have been relegated to footnote.
The Ramones performing in 1977 (Image: Getty)
The Ramones thrived in the 1970s, struggled in many ways in the 1980s, but the 1990s saw an initial return to the band being back in fashion.
The poppy earworm hooks, direct and to-the-point lyrics, and stripped-down, simple song structures gave way to successful multi-platinum selling groups like Green Day and Blink-182, who were more than happy to cite the band in interviews and rave about how on-point and worth replicating their formula was.
This never translated into the thing that matters in the music industry, record sales, but it ensured that the band was discovered by the influential lifeline of a new generation.
By 2009, 48 tribute albums to the Ramones had been released, featuring artists spanning the range from the obscurest and most underground to the biggest-selling acts of all time.
Interest in the band, according to trends, starts to decline from this period on but stays consistent through the early 2010s. During this period, the name Ramones, with its main members dead and nothing but a legacy to lean on, had become a fashionable name yet again.
Except this time, it didn’t quite seem to be about the band’s music and its cultural influence, but as an exercise in branding. There was no one with actual stakes left to say no, and so the time had finally come to fully cash in on the legacy.
The band’s name was thoughtlessly slapped on everything from tennis shoes and skateboards to a limited-edition line of pinball machines. This over-saturation, while profitable for the estates, began to have a diluting effect. When a symbol of scrappy integrity is used to sell a product, it forces a subconscious reevaluation. The authenticity is called into question, and there lies the very antithesis of what’s seen as cool in a punk rock band.
After 2015? Interest in the band withers and continues to wither.
The Ramones may be entering a new phase, transitioning from the cycle of trends to an established part of the rock and roll firmament. I guess we’ll see once the 50th anniversary of their eponymous debut rolls by next year.
Their music hasn’t become less potent, by any means. But the cultural vehicle for it has changed. The Ramones’ formula no longer feels like a revelation, but a foundational text, an ancient scroll to be studied and respected, perhaps not to be blatantly emulated.
The search for cool is perpetually forward-looking, and the Ramones, for the first time in decades, are being looked at as history. But history, as any music fan knows, has a funny way of repeating itself. All it takes is someone new to throw on ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’ for the cycle to start all over again.
