One of Them

475. RAMONES, "Pinhead"
Produced by Tony Bongiovi; written by the Ramones
1977 Did not make pop charts

As always with the Ramones, it's not about the words. There are . . . what? Maybe forty words in the whole song. The narrator's in a hospital, maybe of the mental variety, and he's met a nurse who's changed his outlook.

Did anybody take this scenario seriously? No. This wasn't realism in which the audience became emotionally involved. As always with the Ramones, you identified with the performance not with the song. This is a song about being an outcast but feeling as if you've found a home. Despite the clear reference to Freaks, the feeling here is quite the opposite of the one at the end of Tod Browning's mutilated film. In fact, it the opposite of the feeling that the singer declares in the lyric. Along with Joey, we want to be freaks. We want to be pinheads. (Bill Griffith's Zippy comics had just started to be syndicated nationally the year before this single was released.) We all want to shout GABBA GABBA HEY (gabba gabba hey) . . .

People who think punk was all about alienation only get half the story, at least when it comes to the willfully goofy Ramones. If Johnny Rotten wanted to alienate and resensitize his audience to the point where they were self-conscious about the political economy of rock and roll, Joey Ramone wanted to build his audience a big fat clubhouse. We may be alienated from society, brothers and sisters, but we're all freaks together.

At the Center, and in the Spotlight

500. SLEATER-KINNEY, "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone"
Produced and written by Sleater-Kinney
1997 Did not make pop charts

If I could pick one track that was at the heart of this project, this would be it. Why? I'll list just five or six reasons:

(1) It features a strong female band. There has been no greater change in rock and roll since 1980 than the fact that women are now commonplace in rock.

(2) It gives central mythic significance to the Ramones, which is only right and proper since the Ramones are at the center of the modern history of the Western world. Take that, Beatlemaniacs. And oh yes the fact that it was written in the year the Ramones broke up makes it even sweeter.

(3) The song plays very cleverly with the false distinction between pop and art, parodying the posing of underground rock clubs (come downtown/put on your best frown) while admitting the dirty little secret at the heart of most of the ridiculously named "alternative" music of the 1990s: everybody wants to be a rock and roll star. They all want to be wildly popular with adoring fans. They just don't want to be bland while doing it. But the idea that artistic merit is inevitably in inverse proportion to popularity is sophomoric and should be grown out of by any serious artist in a form as innately popular as rock. Otherwise, in the unlikely event that they do hit the jackpot, they will end up as twisted in knots and suicidal as Kurt Cobain (who, like S-K, came from the Great Northwest, so you can toss out your purely environmental theories of depression).

(4) For at least five years, Sleater-Kinney were the queens of rock and roll, hands down, no dispute. But please don't ask me to choose between Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker for the title of Absolute Queen. Can't they just rule together?

(5) For thousands of girls who, unlike S-K and Patti Smith, couldn't make the gender leap, these three women were their Joey Ramones, the same way that the Beatles were Joey's, and Chuck Berry was the Beatles', and so on and so on, probably going back to King David and his mad lyrework way back in the day.

(6) It's what I thought. It's rock and roll. uh yeah uh yeah uh yeah uh yeah :)

You know, if I could somehow tie this track into the last three decades of hiphop, it would be at the heart of this project. Well, at least I can put it at the center.

While America Slept

501. RAMONES, "I Wanna Be Sedated"
Produced by Tommy Erdelyi & Ed Stasium; written by the Ramones
1978 Did not make pop charts

502. SONIC YOUTH, "Teenage Riot"
Produced by Nick Sansano; written by Sonic Youth
1987 Did not make pop charts

Two songs about rock bands, a bracket of narcolepsy to cover a decade.

When the Ramones recorded "I Wanna Be Sedated," it was a narrowly biographical work, just a song about a desperate urge to block out the bombardment of sensation that attended a nonstop tour, one that the band sometimes seemed to be on for its entire existence.

Very quickly, though, the song became an anthem, maybe one of the most widely recognized rock songs ever that never made the Billboard Hot 100. That in itself says something. The song didn't hit suddenly. It spread like a virus. Once exposed ,75% of the youth who heard it could never get it out of their heads. Yes, that was what it felt like, even if you weren't in a rock band: jesus christ it's just too much make it stop just give me my head back from all this overstimulation sure I'll try ritalin whatever.

Fast forward nine years to Sonic Youth, everybody's new favorite downtown New York band, who sometimes played Ramones covers for their encores at Maxwell's, the best club the New York scene had in the 1980s. (Because of Manhattan's draconian cabaret laws, the best club the New York scene had in the 1980s was in Hoboken, New Jersey.) Despite their affinity, Sonic Youth was in some ways the Ramones' mirror image. The Ramones always wanted to be widely popular but ended up serving a sizable cult. Sonic Youth always wanted to be a cult band and tried to hide their true love of pop under an overcompensating level of postmodern winking. They knew enough Madonna to cover her in the late 80s but hid it under the moniker of Ciccone Youth; they covered the Carpenters's best song, but they did it for a pro-choice benefit album.

The most important difference, though, is one of time: in "I Wanna Be Sedated," Joey Ramone wanted to keep sleeping; in "Teenage Riot," Thurston Moore wants to wake up. And while the Ramones aren't singing about anything more than a rock and roll tour, Sonic Youth is purposefully singing about something much larger. As critics realized from the second Daydream Nation (the album on which the song appears) was released twenty years ago, this is an indictment of young apathy in the Reagan era, and it's pretty scathing if surprisingly indirect.

As a member of the generation under indictment here, I could point to all sorts of things that we successfully resisted in those years--apartheid, US involvement in Central America, etc.--but the very fact that I'm emphasizing resistance rather than direct political confrontation might be enough to constitute yet another charge against semi-conscious ol' us. But your honor, you can't indict an entire generation on the basis of just two rock and roll songs. Look at all that these other, worthy, alternative teens accomplished in that decade, the ones who didn't fritter away their time going to rock clubs. Basta. We slept, in part because we were tired of the 60s, which seemed to drag on endlessly into the 70s, and of hippies and their phony Beatlemania and their endless to-do lists because the planet was never perfect enough for them.

Eventually, we did wake up, but we should have set the alarm earlier. We had too much to do that day.