In his book, Ramones, part of Continuum's 33 1/3 series of in-depth analyses of individual albums, Nicholas Rombes writes that while today the term "punk" calls up very specific imagery because of its commodified place in popular culture, at its inception, punk was unstable and unsure, and that "... attached to it were all sorts of meanings and signs expressed in the magazines, newspapers, fanzines, and documentaries that covered what was then coming to be known as 'punk rock'" (6). This is certainly in line with Jameson's claims about postmodernism, and Ramones—recorded over seven days for $6,400 and clocking in at around thirty minutes—can be seen as an exemplary album to help codify and solidify the early postmodern aspects of punk rock as a whole. Rombes writes that "Ramones is either the last great modern record, or the first great postmodern one," and makes the assertion that it is entirely "...aware of its status as pop culture, [but] it nonetheless has unironic aspirations toward art" (3). In the following pages, I intend to examine Ramones through the lens of each of Jameson's features of postmodernity, and to make a more vigorous claim than Rombes that, indeed, Ramones is not only the first great postmodern record, but an excellent example of postmodernism as Jameson defines it.

Jameson argues that there are as many forms of postmodernism as there are high modernist forms against which postmodernism can react. Jameson brings attention to the formerly subversive forms of modernism which have become "...dead, stifling, canonical, the reified monuments one has to destroy to do anything new" (1847), and asserts that postmodernism has the "... effacement in it of some key boundaries or separations, most notably the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture" (1847). Where mainstream rock music in the 1970s had become bloated, commercial, and self-referential (for example, in the form of "rock operas" like the Who's Tommy or long-form progressive experimentation from bands such as Genesis and Yes), punk rock—and especially the music of the Ramones—represents a guttural and instinctual rejection of those old forms, speeding up the songs and rejecting guitar solos, jettisoning itself from academic notions of advanced music theory, and eschewing glam fashion in favor of tough, urban, ugly aesthetics.

According to Jameson, "One of the most significant features or practices of postmodernism today is pastiche" (1848). There is an important distinction between pastiche and parody, both of which "... involve the imitation or, better still, the mimicry of other styles and particularly of the mannerisms and stylistic twitches of other styles" (Jameson 1848). While parody capitalizes on the uniqueness of individual authorial styles, and aims for humor and ridicule, Jameson argues that pastiche works quite differently in that it "... is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody's ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic" (1849).

The Ramones are not parodists, and they do not necessarily aim to ridicule the established practices of canonical rock music that came before them. In his autobiography, Commando, Ramones guitarist Johnny Ramone writes: "What we did was take out everything that we didn't like about rock and roll and use the rest, so there would be no blues influence, no long guitar solos, nothing that would get in the way of the songs" (11). This speaks directly to Jameson's assertion that "... features that in an earlier period or system were subordinate now become dominant, and features that had been dominant again become secondary" (1859). Instead of quoting previous texts or drawing attention to the glaring flourishes and glamorous excesses that had become hallmarks of mainstream rock music, they incorporate a wide variety of influences—most from arguably low-brow, pop-culture sources—to create their sound and image. In his excellent oral history of punk, Please Kill Me, Legs McNeil, co-founder of Punk magazine, describes all the influences that went into the magazine's content, and by extention,  into the early punk experience: "[John] Holmstrom wanted the magazine to be a combination of everything we were into—television reruns, drinking beer, getting laid, cheeseburgers, comics, grade-B movies, and this weird rock & roll that nobody but us seemed to like: the Velvets, the Stooges, the New York Dolls, and now the Dictators" (203). 

For example, the Ramones sound is aggressive and fast, but it also has elements of the bubblegum pop music of the 1950s, and their lyrical subject matter ranges from schoolyard violence ("Beat On the Brat") to sniffing glue ("Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue") to male prostitution ("53rd & 3rd") with a special emphasis on the bizarre. Consider the incorporation and juxtaposition of seemingly disparate elements in the title of the album's opening song, "Blitzkrieg Bop," whose title combines imagery of the brutality of World War II Nazi military campaigns and the innocence and fun of 1950s dance songs and sock hops. Stylistically, "Blitzkrieg Bop" is a repackaging—a non-ironic mimicry, a pastiche—of elements from another contemporary band who the Ramones saw as competition. Johnny Ramone writes: "'Blitzkrieg Bop' was our 'Saturday Night,' you know, that song by the Bay City Rollers. We had to have some kind of chant just like they did" (152).

Craig Leon, who produced Ramones, made a special effort to pay homage to The Beatles, not by obviously copying their musical style or sense of fashion (though the original cover of the album was meant to have mimicked the cover of Meet the Beatles, which again attracts attention to just how important the Ramones wanted to be), but by incorporating the intricacies of their recording technique employed in the Beatles album A Hard Day's Night. In an interview with Nicholas Rombes, Leon recounts, "We did a lot of overdubbing and double-tracked vocals, going for a bizarre emulation of the recording values of [the Beatles'] 'A Hard Day's Night.' The stereo image was inspired by that as well" (Ramones 73). On Ramones, the bass and guitar are hard panned right and left so that if you mute one speaker, you will effectively lose an instrument, and it is arguable that this move compromised the integrity of the album—Johnny Ramone himself describes it as "weird" (152)—but in incorporating the stylistic choices of Beatles producer George Martin while not necessarily incorporating many other aspects of the Beatles' sound, the Ramones demonstrate Jameson's position that radical breaks in periods "do not generally involve complete changes of content but rather the restructuring of a certain number of elements already given: features that in an earlier period or system were subordinate now become fully dominant, and features that had been dominant again become secondary" (1859). In this case, the dominant feature (the music itself) is overtaken by the once-marginal and unintentional feature of the Beatles' music (the recorded sound field, itself a product of the limitations of sound recording in the 1960s).

Jameson's nostalgic mode features prominently on Ramones, in both musical arrangements and subject matter. Jameson discusses the film Body Heat, which takes place in a contemporary setting but uses imagery and themes from the 1930s, in these terms: "It seems to me exceedingly symptomatic to find the very style of nostalgia films invading and colonizing even those movies today which have contemporary settings: as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience" (1853). The songs on Ramones seem to exist in their own present tense, but they rely heavily on nostalgic imagery. "I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement" features a narrator who is terrified of the unknown, lurking thing in the basement—a popular trick from 1950s horror films, but perhaps a reference to the more recent 1973 S.F. Browning drive-in film Don't Look in the Basement!—and prominent use of the '50s slang term "daddy-o." Similarly, the Ramones cover "Let's Dance," a 1962 dance tune by Chris Montez, which itself references previous dance crazes: "We'll do the twist, the stomp, the mashed potato too / Any old dance that you wanna do." Hardly punk rock material, but the Ramones incorporate this nostalgia subversively, setting it to an impossibly fast tempo and surrounding it with buzz-saw guitars. As in Jameson's discussion of Star Wars as a nostalgic revisiting of Buck Rogers serials, the Ramones seem determined to revisit the stomping grounds of their youth, or perhaps only the vision of youth that is presented through mass media. Considering the drug addictions and history of prostitution of bassist and songwriter Dee Dee Ramone and the juvenile delinquency of guitarist Johnny Ramone, sock hops and 1950s pop innocence are not likely to have been firsthand experiences, but rather archetypal things experienced through films and music. Jameson writes that "... for whatever reason, we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about that past, which itself remains forever out of reach" (1853), and the Ramones use of 1950s dance crazes to describe their own manic energy or the familiar trope of the thing in the basement to describe their own alienation or sense of otherness seems like exactly the sort of condemnation to nostalgia to which Jameson refers.

While plenty of moments on Ramones rely on the nostalgic mode, others refer to contemporary film, and the effect is an interesting one: an uneasy juxtaposition of playfulness and menace. "Chain Saw," for instance, is situated between the sweet pop tune "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" and the drug-crazed ode to teenage boredom "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue," a song that would be purely comical if its subject matter were not so autobiographical for Dee Dee, a longtime glue-sniffer, heroine addict, and methadone junkie. In "Chain Saw," Joey Ramone assumes the persona of a teenager in love whose girlfriend has been brutally murdered, and it is notable that the narrative takes place as an offscreen re-imagining of Tobe Hooper's 1974 film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And the narrator's blasé acceptance of his lover's fate ("They chopped her up and I don't care") speaks in its own way to a postmodern view of the state of popular cinema. Hooper's film is often regarded as the first "slasher" film, a horror sub-genre which, like punk rock, mixes aggressive violence with offbeat humor, and the influence of such a film on the Ramones' music plays to Jameson's assertion that as society fragments and splinters—as each group and profession develops their own language and subculture—the possibility of a linguistic norm is replaced by stylistic diversity. The language of horror films and punk rock is not the language of the modern establishment, the university, or the mainstream, but in 1976, it was clearly emerging as a specialized language among a growing group of fringe practitioners. While a sense of humor is central to the Ramones' music, there is also the distinct sense that they wish to be taken very seriously. In Rebels Wit Attitude: Subversive Rock Humorists, Iain Ellis writes that "For them, dumb humor was not merely a lyrical affectation; it was the essence of everything they did, said, and were" (156). Johnny Ramone writes of the band's sense of purpose: "I had very high aspirations, and I knew that to start a movement, we needed to have other bands and had to influence kids to start new bands. We couldn't be out there like that on our own" (50).

An important aspect of those aspirations to greatness was a unification of their image, which aligns with Jameson's ideas on the death of the subject. Jameson writes that "The great modernisms were, as we have said, predicated on the invention of a personal, private style, as unmistakable as your fingerprint, as incomparable as your own body" (1850). He uses the examples of William Faulkner's long sentences and D.H. Lawrence's nature imagery (1848), but he could just as well have directed his attention to the arena of modernist rock and roll music, citing Pete Townsend's choppy, windmilling guitar strokes or Brad Delp's wailing, theatrical tenor voice. But the Ramones presented themselves as non-individuals, as gang members, and as indistinguishable from one another. And, by extension, as indistinguishable from the punk kids who listened to their music and attended their concerts. "One of the rules was that we had a dress code," Dee Dee Ramone writes in his autobiography, Lobotomy: Surviving the Ramones. "We adopted the uniform of ripped jeans, bowl haircut, leather jackets, and sneakers. It was all part of being a Ramone" (124). But, the Ramones look didn't emerge fully formed; Johnny Ramone writes that in the band's early days of performing at CBGB's in New York City, the band dressed in an odd amalgamation of rock styles, from gold lamé pants to leopard-skin vests. "We were still evolving into the image we're known for, but it was trial and error at first. We didn't know what to do because glitter was still in" (43). And he continues: "We wanted every kid to be able to identify with our image. And there'd be no problem for kids coming to the shows dressed like us, or anything like that" (46).

This effort to be indistinguishable from their audience certainly set the Ramones apart from their predecessors (consider Peter Gabriel's over-the-top performances with multiple costume changes, makeup, and stage props), and signaled a radical rejection of the concepts of rock stardom, selfhood, and individual stylistic differentiation. Aside from looking identical, the Ramones all adopted the surname "Ramone," "they symbolically erased the aura of individuality and stardom that pervaded the rock scene of the early seventies" (Ellis 156). Dee Dee Ramone (born Douglas Colvin) describes this as a sort of pastiche in itself, the idea originating with something he had read about the early days of the Beatles: "I guess everyone wanted to sound glamorous. It was in style then, and John Lennon called himself Johnny Silver. George was George Perkins and Paul was Paul Ramone. I thought it was pretty outrageous to change your name to a made-up one, but I liked the idea" (23) In taking the pseudonymic surname of one of the Beatles and applying it to the whole band, the Ramones overturned the "glamorous" notions of the previous generation's rock bands and essentially established the sort of collective identity that said, I'm a Ramone, you're a Ramone, we're all Ramones. The Ramones demonstrated the same sort of musical skills as any garage band operating in America at the time, and through rejection of individuality—by adopting a uniform and a common surname—they made rock music accessible to a new generation growing up in a postmodern world.

Fredric Jameson writes of postmodern architecture, paying special attention to the example of John Portman's Los Angeles hotel, the Bonaventure, which, according to Jameson, "does not wish to be a part of the city, but rather its equivalent and its replacement or substitute" (1855). In discussing the reflective glass outer walls of the hotel's towers, Jameson writes that "...when you seek to look at the hotel's outer walls you cannot see the hotel itself, but only the distorted images of everything that surrounds it" (1855). The Ramones operate in much the same way, aiming at once to replace the musical establishment around them, and to reflect the urban toughness and commercialized world they inhabit; they are both a rejection of consumer capitalism (here embodied by mainstream rock music) and a commodity in their own right (they did, indeed, work for Sire Records and they did, indeed, make money for playing music). Jameson writes that "The newer architecture [...] stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimension" (1854). While the Ramones' aesthetics do not directly relate to Jameson's "hyperspace" (1854), their music, especially in the live concert setting, could achieve a similar effect as Portman's Bonaventure with its disorienting towers and atriums: the music is ear-splitting in volume, the audience surges and thrashes violently, and everyone's dressed in a similar style, so who's to say where tower one (the band) ends, and towers two, three, and four (perhaps the audience, the club, the merchandising) begin. If we do not necessarily need new organs and appendages to comprehend our position in this new punk-rock hyperspace, we do, at least, require a new way of thinking, talking, and writing about underground music.

Jameson calls Vietnam the "first terrible postmodernist war" and continues to assert that its story "... cannot be told in any of the traditional paradigms of the war novel or movie—indeed that breakdown of any shared language through which a veteran might convey such experience, among the principle subjects of the book and may be said to open up the place of a whole new reflexivity" (1857). The Ramones do not address America's involvement in Vietnam on Ramones, but they do address it in "Commando," a song from their second album, Leave Home ("They do their best, do what they can / Get them ready for Vietnam," and the nonsensical "Third rule is don't talk to Commies / Fourth rule is eat kosher salamis."). The songs for their first two albums were written before either album was recorded, so it is clear that Vietnam was on their minds at the time. But, Dee Dee, who was born and raised in 1950s and '60s Germany, contributes a song— "Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World"—that addresses World War II from a postmodernist stance. "I'm a shock trooper in a stupor, yes I am / I'm a Nazi schatzi, you know I fight for the fatherland," says the narrator. And, the narrative shifts (after a call of "Eins! Zwei! Drie! Vier!") to a love story, intermingling the narrator's intentions for involvement in the war with a misguided attempt to win over a girl: "Today your love, tomorrow the world." Certainly, it can be seen as anti-patriotic for an American band to claim Germany as the "fatherland," especially in a Nazi context, and there is plenty of evidence that early punk rock was mixed up in fascism to a degree that some found unsettling. In his essay, "The White Noise Supremacists," contrarian rock critic Lester Bangs addresses this issue: "This scene and the punk stance in general are riddled with self-hate, which is always reflexive, and anytime you conclude that life stinks and the human race mostly amounts to a pile of shit, you've got the perfect breeding ground for fascism" (275). If nothing else, the Ramones political leanings (Johnny Ramone was punk rock's most notable Republican, and his views often complicated the band's approach to politics) complicate the once clear cut patriotism or protest of American rock and roll. Is Dee Dee a Nazi or not? What does Communism have to do with salamis? All of the goofball imagery and nonsense rhyming seems in line with Jameson's assertion that once shared language breaks down, a new paradigm is needed to discuss war and the soldier's experience, not unlike Jameson's example of Michael Herr's Dispatches, in which a soldier rants, "... we'd still be running around inside our skins like something was after us, ha, ha, La Vida Loca" (1858).

In discussing the aesthetics of consumer society, Jameson points to "New types of consumption; planned obsolescence; an ever more rapid rhythm of fashion and styling changes; the penetration of advertising, television and the media generally to a hitherto unparalleled degree throughout society" (1860) as markers that signal the radical break between modernism and postmodernism, and discusses the extent to which modernism ceases to be shocking or countercultural when it becomes canonical and academic. Postmodernism, Jameson argues, is embedded in the culture around it, and certainly, the Ramones' use of mass-culture elements and low-brow humor apply here, but it is also worth noting that punk rock as a movement is certainly not intended to blend in, but to reject, to rebel, and to hold up a funhouse mirror to mass culture. Nicholas Rombes argues that ""The Ramones imbued this nothingness and rejection with a fierce humor that transported nihilism into the realm of pop culture" (6), and it is arguable that in doing so, they embody Jameson's definition of postmodernism. But, a survey of their thirty-year career as a band demonstrates that they do not subscribe to ideas of planned obsolescence or fleeting changes in fashion.

Indeed, over the course of their career, which ended in 1996, the Ramones more or less left their sound alone, and while minor shifts did occur from time to time (for instance, Joey Ramone developed a sort of growl in the mid 1980s, perhaps as an answer to the emergence of more hardcore, aggressive punk bands), the basic elements of the tension betwen aggression and comic-book and B-movie humor, '60s bubblegum pop, and simple musical arrangements remained intact. Rombes writes that "In America, there is a skepticism and wariness about any artistic or cultural form that doesn't evolve, that doesn't grow. There is no more damning critique than the charge of repeating yourself. And yet punk was precisely about repetition; its art lay in the rejection of elaboration" (4). And that rejection of elaboration is precisely what makes the Ramones the quintessential postmodern band; they exist devoid of individual stylistic flourishes, and they incorporate wide-reaching elements of mass culture without making the distinction between high and low forms. Jameson leaves the reader with the final questions of whether postmodernism can attempt to be culturally subversive the way high modernism was, and whether postmodernism can resist the logic of consumer capitalism detailed above. While Jameson leave this question open and unanswered, the Ramones, especially on their first album,  are an excellent example of postmodernism both embracing and incorporating culture and capitalism while simultaneously attempting to reject and shock the mainstream.

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​Works Cited
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Ellis, Iain. Rebels Wit Attitude: Subversive Rock Humorists. Soft Skull Pr, 2008. Print.
Jameson, Fredric. "Postmodernism and Consumer Society." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Leitch, et al., ed. 2nd ed. New York: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2010. 1846-60. Print.
MC5. Kick Out the Jams. Electra, 1969. CD.
McNeil, Legs, and Gillian McCain. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. New York City, NY: Grove Press, 2006. Print.
Ramone, Dee Dee. Lobotomy: Surviving the Ramones. New York, NY: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000. Print
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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Dir. Tobe Hooper. Perf. Marilyn Burns and Gunnar Hansen. Bryanston Pictures, 1974. DVD.