2001-04-16
Rest in Peace, joey ramone, posted at 4:18 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com Joey Ramone died over the weekend. Very sad - he was just 49. The Ramones have always represented weird things for me. Back when I was in high school, I hung out on the outskirts of the "alternative" crowd. I really wasn't part of any crowd at all, but I admired a lot of different cliques from afar. The "alternative" crowd is one that I could admire from fairly close, as one of my good friends, annie.newdream.net, was one of the prime members of that crowd. The Ramones were the sort of the "password" for the group. If you knew who they were and listened to them, you were accepted with open arms. If not, yet still wore flannel, you were ridiculed behind your backs. The same is true if you bought your flannel from The Gap instead of taking it from Grandpa's closet. You couldn't like Green Day without a sneer that they were just copying off The Ramones. I didn't even know who they were. I certainly wasn't going to admit that, though - it would jeopardize whatever connection to the group I had. I now see this clique as no different from any other clique in high school. But I wanted to be a part of them so bad. They were so intelligent, so anti-establishment. I wasn't necessarily ready for that, but nevertheless I admired and desired it. Mainly, I longed for acceptance in any sort of group in high school. I never found it. About my sophomore year of college, I was impressed for the 67th time listening to "I Wanna Be Sedated," and broke down and bought a couple of CD's by the Ramones. This started a completely naturally, unaffected affection for the band. They've never reached the upper echelon of my favorite musical artists (http://www.msu.edu/~miazgama/decadealbums.htm), but there is absolutely nothing artificial about my liking them. Maybe a part of me still longed for that acceptance in any sort of social strata in high school, but a bigger part of me simply admired the perfection of their 2-minute pop-punk songs. "Mania" is one of my favorite summer albums - it's goofy, surreal, and catchy as hell. Rest in Peace, Joey Ramone.