"Hey Nicholas, we'd really like you to write a 33 1/3 book on the Ramones' first album."
"Nah, I'm writing this long treatise on punk and..."
"Seriously, we need a book in this series on that first album."
"But punk...and treatise...and..."
"Think you can angle it toward the Ramones' first album?"
"...yeah."

I listened to the audio version of this, so it lends itself quite nicely to me being able to fraction out this book. So...the first two-thirds of this short work is about the larger context of the punk movement. Yes, Rombes does remember occasionally that this is supposed to be about the Ramones' first album, so he grudgingly inserts their name here and there, and circles around to them to include them, but he plays just as much lip service to the other bands that existed at the time, or preceded them. The Velvet Underground. The Sex Pistols. The Talking Heads. Blondie. The Dead Boys. The New York Dolls. Hell, even Black Sabbath gets more air time than you'd expect.

Finally, just when you think Rombes is going to run out the clock, he finally (perhaps accidentally) meanders around to a really short, mostly non-illuminating track-by-track run through of the album. It works out to about one-sixth of the book. As soon as that last track is discussed and forgotten, he angles right back on that bigger discussion of punk as a whole for the last sixth of the book.

So, despite the title, literally only one-sixth of this book focuses on one of the greatest albums of a decade full of great albums. And five-sixths is devoted to the author citing his reading sources and talking about everything except the album.

Self-indulgent crap. ( )

Rombes's essay is divided into a section on context ("Ramones in Their Time") and another on the LP itself ("Ramones").

The first section is a nice account of punk overall. Not to say it's persuasive in all respects, but it provides a nice portrait without repeating the standard lines, and takes pains to show how the punk scene of the 1970s was, first of all, not limited to music but cut a wide swath through popular culture, and secondly, differed in many respects from what often is assumed today (i.e. early 21st century).

Especially interesting is Rombes's discussion of the roles of fascist iconography, and politics generally; violence and aggression (physical and musical); artistic stances toward capitalism and marketing; popular culture and taste; and even of sincerity and irony in punk music. I do think too much has been projected backward into punk, making it more coherent and consistent than it was, and Rombes suggests that it is from precisely its 'incoherent texts' (he borrows this phrase from film critic Robin Wood) that punk produces its greatest impact.

The section on the album also emphasizes that the Ramones were not always consistent with punk's alleged pedigree. But that, reasons Rombes, is a strength. He also gets across how the sound was fresh and new, stepping away from tradition, and yet (here comes that inconsistency, that fractured nature of punk generally and the Ramones in particular) underneath the aural assault the Ramones held a deep respect and admiration for bubblegum pop.

Overall the first section is more rewarding than the second, which I found inferior to the liner notes to the Rhino re-release. It's worth reading both, but the liner notes provide more of a cut-by-cut account of the album, and somehow manages to situate the recording of it in the band's history, as well. Rombes' is a more general view, an account of the scene more than the band. ( )