The Ramones and the Caribou
I watched an amazing documentary last night called “End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones.” The movie is narrated solely by the members of the Ramones and their various acquaintances such as Joe Strummer and Phil Spector, amongst others. While doing the usual band-member characterizations and descriptions of in-band politics that most rockumentaries do, (which, in this case was actually really interesting and gave more insight into the music) what makes “End of the Century” so good is that everything about it is directed towards reminding you of the power that pop and rock have to release our emotional, fun, childish, instinctual, antisocial, loving, hating, angry, happy, special selves from our socially privileged and repressive intellectual and rational selves-how punk rock and the Ramones especially served musically to perform this function and save music from analytical jackoffing of rock critics and the losery finger-poking of production eggheads and music industry fat cats: fuck you to everybody and everything trying to control this; make it go so fast and so simple and so loud that everything else ceases to exist. And the movie does this through tons and tons of live footage, a lot of which is from 1974 and 75 before their first EP. This shit is simply mind-blowing. How the Ramones came up with this stuff at that time I can’t even fathom. And the movie is very convincing in its argument that the Ramones were true weirdos, not these fake weirdo-chique performance acts you see everywhere nowadays. And by virtue of them being the real mccoy weird, lacking all the good looks of rocknrollers in the past or to come, and the music that seemed to come directly from this and to facilitate exactly this, I have to give a big heart-felt psychic thankyou to them for creating a special imaginative and emotional space for people like me, who never really understood social codes and had alot of trouble adapting to them and becoming a functioning unit within a productive community. I'm still not there and because of bands like the Ramones I'm not sure I want to be, and I can feel really really good about that (sometimes). I highly, highly recommend watching this to anyone who loves (or loved) punk rock, or just anyone who simply loves music and what it can do to a person. For those of you in Kingston, you can pick it up at Classic Video as soon as I get around to returning it.
After the Ramones documentary I watched part of another documentary about the detrimental effects of climate change on caribou herds in Alaska. I wanted to write about this one too because I didn’t know how to reconcile inside myself the conflicting feelings from something so absolutely terrifying and upsetting with something so revivifying and beautiful. But this is long enough, so maybe another time.
After the Ramones documentary I watched part of another documentary about the detrimental effects of climate change on caribou herds in Alaska. I wanted to write about this one too because I didn’t know how to reconcile inside myself the conflicting feelings from something so absolutely terrifying and upsetting with something so revivifying and beautiful. But this is long enough, so maybe another time.