Sex Pistols and Ramones both are essential music.
Both were listed in Spin magazines Top Ten all time bands per some very late 80s list. The only significant thing about that was they got compared to the Beatles/Led Zeppeling mainstream bands. Whoever wrote that towed the pop line for the other 8 bands.
He had a really good line on the Ramones, that they had poured out everything they had into an album and pretty much just released that album every year.
But to be fair, they were something new and original in the pre-packaged and corporate music of the late 70s. Songs like Beat on the Brat was just shockingly honest and simple. We're a happy family shows flashes of a deeper vocabulary than previously suspected.
The Ramones were more about a bunch of guys who wanted to rock (which I am taking from the Spin article) with limited musical talent, but pure drive.
And, of course, they are (arguably) the most early identifiable root of speed metal IMO.
They showed you don't have to be pretty, talented, or in any way corporately marketable to rock. And still pay the bills.
But then there are the Sex Pistols.
The Ramones were a declaration of war against corporate music, but the Pistols were more against the UK establishment.
Lets through out Sid Viscious for a minute, I really found him interesting, his surname is well chosen, but there is very little of him remaining with the Sex Pistols archives. Almost all the recorded music was with Glen Matlock and he was actually able to play.
But that raises another point, the Pistols really were not well captured by just Never Mind the Bullocks. You can glimpse what it was really like with them in Lipstick Traces, from the raid on the ferry concert and the whole thing really.
Also Johnny Lydon had a really unique ability to make people either hate him or like him with just his image.
The Pistols also have the distinction the rock lore notoriety of early implosion. Nothing makes your legacy more tantalizing than wondering what else you might have been capable of.
The real fury of the Pistols is really not left behind. The horrible social conditions of the 70s that created them and the whole punk UK movement really are hard to comprehend in other areas.
"Do ya wanna make tea at the BBC
Do ya wanna be
Do ya really wanna be a cop
Career opportunity
The one that never knocks
Every job they offer you's to keep you off the dock
Career opportunity the one that never knocks." - The Clash
I have seen far more bands site the Sex Pistols as an influence, so there is that undercurrent. (Basically, it is the same reasoning for why iTunes has a Jesus & Mary Chain collection in the Essential Music section. They were very influential to other musicians, but didn't really sell alot of albums.)
Bands like Duran Duran and U2 have held them up as influences, usually along with David Bowie. Whether or not you like or hate those bands, it is very curious that they would claim kinship to a band so far off of their reservation.
Musically, I would put Steve Jones alone about the Ramones. Much of his guitar work has been imitated and digested by bands since then. When you hear Generation X's version of Dancing with Myself, can anyone say they cannot identify Jones' work?
Lydon when on to PIL, which really was a key to Industrial. Even Unlistenable, IMO.
Lydon was more of thinking man, bigger vocabulary, alot more meat to his lyrics over the course of his career. More with PIL, of course.
I Wanna be Me is one of my favorites, Submission is quite good.
Between the two, I gotta go with the Pistols.
I have the entire discography of the Ramones, and I have yet to listen to all of it.
I scrape around to find some small scrap of something I haven't yet heard.
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