JAM JOURNAL

All my favorite music sucks

Ramones saved me from the loss of my childhood anger.

By REO
Noah Pinales / Daily Trojan

Life doesn’t let up. As a kid, neither did I.

I was a spiteful child. If you believe my parents, toddler me once ran around (and outside) the house on a family vacation  — completely naked — because I didn’t want to take a bath. I’ve always been a runner. Whenever I was let out of my stroller in public, I would sprint off the second I hit the ground. Even so, I was an expert at staying still. I once attached myself to a stop sign because my parents wouldn’t buy me a dog from the fair.


Daily headlines, sent straight to your inbox.

Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up with the latest at and around USC.

In elementary school, I got in trouble for roughhousing all the time. I threw my friend in a river, kicked another friend in the face and gave a high schooler a black eye because I was bored. I can’t count the number of PlayStation controllers I broke over the years.

I was a demon child that would destroy anything and everything. I seemed to have boundless energy and an unimpaired anger.

It was the best of times.

Years passed, and I shed my red-hot skin. Call it self-preservation. Call it letting The Man control me. Call it fully committing to avoid fucking up my life.

My family started spending significantly less money, not having to repair the damages I caused. My friends started to get injured less and less. The world began to breathe a sigh of relief as it began to realize my reign of terror was over.

I, on the other hand, got mad. Granted, it was no longer smash-everything-in-sight mad; instead, I opted for silently-storm-out-of-the-room mad.

It might have been better for everyone’s personal property (and health) that I went through this change, but it was not better for me. Silently-storm-out-of-the-room mad is the worst kind of mad. Internally, that is. Silently-storm-out-of-the-room mad doesn’t remove the damage you wreak, it just redirects the smackdown. Suddenly, ground zero is your own brain.

Not fun.

Worse still, I lost my identity. The absence of anger was the absence of the last emotion I could exhibit. In my new blank-slate state, classmates would come up to me and ask, “Are you a robot?” What was I supposed to say? I was visibly emotionless, with a monotone voice and no apparent passions or empathy. “Signs point to yes,” I guess. I needed an outlet.

Enter: Ramones. The shittiest band of all time.

The godfathers of punk. My soon-to-be favorite band of all time. Four bozos who barely knew how to play their own instruments and who couldn’t make a good song to save their lives. Angry losers. It was love at first listen.

For some history, Ramones’ debut album, much like the rest of their discography, sucked. It was objectively bad. The album — released April 23, 1976 — was full of nothing but two-minute thrashes, always played at the same tempo and obnoxious volume. Tommy smashed the drums, Johnny led the shredding, Dee Dee strummed the bass every now and then, and Joey rambled out what some might describe as lyrics.

Best of all, the suckiness wasn’t intentional. Unlike some of the punk bands that would follow them, Ramones had absolutely nothing to say. Well, I guess that isn’t exactly true. They had things like this to say: “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend,” “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue,” “I Don’t Wanna Walk Around with You.” Deep stuff.

I’d go so far as to describe them as history’s most successful fuck-ups. Despite their total lack of any type of skill or prowess, they are one of the most ubiquitous bands of all time, even in today’s music landscape.

If you think you haven’t heard Ramones, you’re wrong. If you’ve watched “Priscilla,” “The Bear” or “Spider-Man: Homecoming” (2017), you’ve heard these lovable losers. Oh, you also may have heard them on the 180 or so other movies and TV shows on which they’ve been featured.

Ramones are everywhere, just as they have been since their inception. After their debut album’s release, critics said Ramones “blows everything else off the radio.” In 1979, just three years later, they starred in and provided the soundtrack for one of the worst movies of all time (fittingly), “Rock ’n’ Roll High School.”

Despite their success, they still sucked.

Richard Hell, an actual skilled guitarist from their era, once had to deny Dee Dee a role in a band because the latter didn’t know how to play the most basic chord on a guitar. Hell also said Joey had “that whole mutant vibe,” which is exactly the type of energy you want the figurehead of your boy band to give off. Johnny was famously an asshole, and Tommy … Well, actually, Tommy was pretty alright by most accounts.

Knowing all of this only made me fall more under their electric spell. Listening to Ramones wasn’t the same as listening to any other band. You didn’t have to pay attention to what they were saying because you knew they weren’t saying anything at all. There were no songs to skip because all of the songs sucked equally and sounded the exact same. You could hear their entire discography and not realize that you’d ever changed songs.

Those fuck-ups were catharsis personified. The raging brain cloud that I’d been plagued with ever since losing my break-shit reflex would thunder between two bass-boosted headphones and then pass.

At their core, Ramones were a bunch of screw-ups with no real talent who were always pissed off at nothing in particular. So, obviously, that did not in any way remind me of myself.

Every whine, every clash and every moan was a reminder that these nobodies were the needlessly destructive noise machines that I once was. Yet, somehow, they managed to maintain their rage and not allow it to ruin their lives.

Ramones aren’t just rage. They aren’t just stupidity. They are mostly rage and stupidity. But they are also hope.

Ramones were a bunch of angry losers. I was an angry loser. Or, at the very least, I could be one once more. If they worked, in their own sucky way, then maybe I could, too.

“Jam Journal” is a rotating column featuring a new Daily Trojan editor in each installment commenting on the music most important to them. “Jam Journal” runs every other Thursday. Reo is a chief copy editor at the Daily Trojan.

© University of Southern California/Daily Trojan. All rights reserved.