I'VE NEVER HEARD "ROCKAWAY BEACH"
The other day, I went to the 2009 Acousticue, the latest edition of an annual event the underground music promoter Todd P has been doing for several years
now. Basically, a couple of hundred Williamsburg hipsters (and me) go to some waterfront location and watch a couple of dozen Williamsburg hipster bands play completely acoustically – no amplification whatsoever. (The
milieu being what it is, some of them technically violate the terms and play
electronic keyboards, but I suppose battery-driven is these kids' idea of
acoustic.)
This scene is a few generations or so directly descended from the original punk rockers, the ones who revolutionized music by declaring that anybody could do it, that you could play anywhere, that rock music didn't have to have Champagne
wishes and caviar dreams.
So it was fitting that this year's Acousticue was held on Rockaway Beach, the place that the Thomas Edisons of punk rock, the Ramones, first celebrated in glorious song 32 summers ago. I pointed out this wonderful confluence to a youthful
friend at the Acousticue, and all I got was a blank stare. She didn't know the song. Outwardly, I maintained a placid
demeanor. But inside, I was thinking, "You don't know 'Rockaway Beach'? How can anyone not know 'Rockaway Beach'?"
OK, maybe this person was a freak. So I mentioned it again to another friend of roughly the same age. Same reaction, a shrug. "It's about here?"
With great trepidation, I tried once more. No dice. They
hadn't heard the song called "Rockaway Beach" either.
Now, I know what you're thinking:
"Michael, you're old!"
But c'mon, we're talking about one of the most iconic songs in punk
rock. Granted, it outsold
"Rockaway Beach" by several orders of magnitude, but it would be like
someone my age saying they'd never heard "Don't Be Cruel."
So why didn't these kids, with their virtually unlimited free access to every note ever recorded, know about "Rockaway Beach"? Some theories:
- After fifty years of the stuff, there's
just too much accumulated rock music to assimilate at this point.
- There's just so much music available now that it's possible to live completely within a large but stylistically confined collection of music.
- The Ramones have become superfluous as a gateway band; punk has become commonplace, easy to grasp, so you don't need their bubblegum pop and '60s girl group echoes to ease you into what many people once considered an abrasive, difficult sound.
- The Ramones' aesthetic isn't relevant anymore: they were playing simple songs really fast and distorted as a reaction to the pomposity of prog and arena rock, and that's just not necessary right now.
- As my colleague Ryan Schreiber reminded me when I asked him about this, there's a high premium on discovering new things first in underground music culture now, so hipsters don't spend much time looking back.
- As stated above, the Ramones were retro in many respects. Even their appearance alluded to Cold War-era hoodlum culture. The most modern and visionary thing about them was that their music was fast and distorted, and that once-revolutionary idea ran its course perhaps 25 years ago. Hipsters embrace the more forward-looking bands from the period directly after the Ramones' heyday — Eno-era Talking Heads, Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees. I bet those kids knew "Once in a Lifetime" and "Love Will Tear Us Apart."
- The groups now influenced by the Ramones are commercial bands, or they play on the Warped tour, both of which are anathema to the folks at Todd P shows. So even if they did hear "Rockaway Beach," they'd shut it out because it sounds like A Simple Plan.
Those are all plausible explanations. And yet… It's "ROCKAWAY BEACH," PEOPLE!!!