No More Ramones to Moan Over

Yeah, too bad. Who's a big fan of Death? Nobody except silly assholes who call themselves Mephisto and Devil Doll and Death Knell and Slob Zombie and the rest.

Anybody dies...that's sad news and a reminder of mortality.

So what I have to say below has nothing whatever to do with Tommy personally. It has to do with the media and the obit games they play, and it's a comment on "revisionist" history.

And it has to do with the strange approach to death...that leads people to over-praise people as if that "tribute" means anything and the person is any the less DEAD.

We've got death freaks who LOVE to be the first with the bad news. They trawl the Internet forums and "social media" with their stupid logos and maybe a photo of a tattoo on their ass, and they think they're the Grim Reaper or something. Ever notice that about these death metal morons and jerks who use skulls and graves on their t-shirts or in their fake Internet names? They really think that embracing death is super KEWL.

Everyone's supposed to think The Ramones were, and still are, cool. Because it was a slow news day and the last of 'em died. This was even news at "The Times of India," which as you know, is the paper that eBay "customer support" workers read. Because they're all in India. If you ever have a major problem at eBay (which is likely to happen most every day) they won't let you e-mail. They insist you call up, give some wog moron your name, address, phone number, listen to the wog's script that ends with "and how can I help you to-day," and then...end up more frustrated and angry than you were before.

But I digress. Only because the other day I had to deal with Gunga Turd, who wouldn't give me a straight answer, kept sing-songing his script, kept telling me, "your call is important" and "I will pass your problem along" and "if you don't get this resolved within three business days, please call back!"

So here's The Times of India, with their second hand twit-brained report on the death of a non-legend:

This is what happens when nobody important has died in a while. A trivial death has to become big news. I'm seeing shit about this guy all over social media. Oh, so sad, man. Oh dude, this is terrible. Oh wow.

As if The Ramones were still making music? As if they did anything worth hearing since 1977? As if their album back then was any good?

As I get older, I notice more and more...revisionist history. Things that I remember...get twisted conveniently by some asshole with a book to sell, a movie to sell, or just a desire to get on TV. This was the case recently with the dreadful Dave Fuck Five special, in which publicity whores like Whoopi Goldberg and Dionne Warwick were willing to stretch the truth and claim to be HUGE FANS, just so they could get more face time on TV. Tom Hanks made himself look like a complete asshole when he raved and raged about this idiot band like they were equal to or even bigger than The Beatles. That's revisionist history.

And now? With every fucking Ramone dying, there's been more of an outcry on how GREAT they were. At least, if it's a slow news day. And nobody really important died recently so THIS death has to be pumped up in importance to fill space.

The Ramones? Come on. I remember tossing their stupid "Rocket to Russia" album days after I got a promo copy. Sure, it was slightly low-class Zappa. The idea behind it, like so much of Zappa, was to be arrogant about being stupid, cool about being crass, and upbeat about being a lowlife. And sure enough, smelly stupid tenement twits loved The Ramones, just as greasy idiots and druggies loved Zappa. Except Zappa, now and then, had a song worth hearing more than once. The Ramones' album was a bunch of very stupid and fairly tuneless rants, most under two minutes. This was fine for gnat-brains with no attention span and a lot of hormones to kill, but really, it sucked.

Zappa was Mr. Music Genius so critics, at times, were intimidated. He also had, at times, a sense of humor and that helped. The Ramones, at times, also had what passed (among idiots) as a sense of humor. Gabba gabba hey humor. Make fun of cretins humor. But still, if you were a critic and setting up the "scene," and telling the world YOU knew what was happening and THEY didn't, it wasn't hip to NOT like the scruffy Ramones.

Except, in reality, few did. Money talks...and bands that don't make much, WALK. Their albums were huge hits? I don't recall that. How come they, like Richard Hell and the Dead Boys, didn't stay with a record label too long, and in essence, dropped off the planet when the much better "New Wave" came along?

The big deal for The Ramones was that almost all the hip music mags and newspapers were in New York. So when "the scene" started "happening" on the East side of Greenwich Village, everybody started "hanging" at joints like stinky CBGB's. And who played there a lot? The Ramones. Did they create "punk?" That would be presumptuous to say. It's just that for that moment in time, being a shitty band with no talent seemed cool. Very quickly a ton of other talentless bands were all over the place. And then, a few people with a faint spark of talent helped weed out the utter shit. But some preferred their bands to be absolutely shitty, as long as they LOOKED good doing it.

The reason why rock has always been tied to fashion (or the lack of it) is that bored drugged out morons go to clubs and have no attention spans, and need "something new" to wear. The music is secondary. Back in 1977, people got the idea that wearing ripped up and smelly clothes was a hip fashion statement. And at first, a cheap one. After all, it cost MONEY to buy a Sgt. Pepper costume, and after a while trippy hippie tie-dye shit was expensive, too. So...people thought grunge was wonderful. A safety pin in the cheek was less expensive than real jewelry. And for a year or two, it worked, with who-gives-a-shit music to go with it. Then? About face and onto disco, and expensive clothes and The Bee Gees with Robin Gibb doing falsetto. And none of that shit holds up, except to people stuck in time, and nostalgists. So at the moment, nostalgists are mourning punk a little more than disco, because the punk people are dying a bit quicker (although hey, 2 of the 3 Bee Gees are dead).

The bottom line is anybody still listening to that fucking "Rocket to Russia" Ramones album? No, they're not. The people who are...nobody wants to hear about them and they don't want to hear about anybody. They can play The Ramones in their fucking basement in New Jersey somewhere, and go to the WFMU convention to hunt up more vintage vinyl while the rest of the world uses spray deodorant.

Yep, a lot of the people we listened to in our youth...are now senior citizens, like this Ramones guy. Poor Tommy...we're seeing a downward curve in longevity, folks. The "greatest generation" are still hanging on in their 80's and 90's even. Kirk Douglas is still around at 97! But this poor guy gets bile duct cancer and is gone at 65.

Yes, when it comes to the music acts of our youth, a lot of them are busy dying. That's not news, that's life.