"All he eats is pizza. I just love the way he…he just holds the pizza jerking above his mouth. He just slithers and slides it into his mouth and it's so sexy the way it [slurping sounds]."

—Riff Randell (P.J. Soles), iRock 'N' Roll High School*

(*A film eclipsing even Under the Cherry Moon in so-bad-it's-awfulness)

Even in my most gay-curious moments, I never thought Joey Ramone resembled a "poem," to quote Randell again (a vaguely alluring hybrid of Almost Famous'sPenny Lane and Punky-my-first-erection-Brewster). Still, if given the opportunity, I would have slobberishly made-out with the man, my passion fueled less by lust than by giddy love of his music.

As a twelfth-grader, jumping along to Cretin Hop in a friend's womanless bedroom, my affections sprang. The teen angst that would follow me into adulthood was both expressed and questioned by the Ramones' angry/jolly lyrics: "Four, five, six, seven/All good cretins go to heaven!" Consummation came outside my sister's apartment, where I sang "We're A Happy Family" to our father, who chuckled at the line, "Daddy likes men." (Listening to Havana Affair on the drive home, my father awkwardly pumped his fist in unison with my head-bobbing.) Romance was rekindled Monday when, driving aimlessly and shouting along with "All the Stuff (and More)," a merging minivan nearly tore my car in two. I laughed. There's lots of great music in the world but, obviously, this was music worth dying for.

Joey Ramone died on April 15, 2001, in a world where the bloated, boring, blonde-and-blue-eyed records he and his colleagues flipped-off are more popular than Peter Frampton could ever have imagined. Our culture is crumbling; a pop stake was driven through poor Joey's heart. Making the Band documents the corporate manufacture of O-Town, whose album was subsequently certified platinum, providing further testament to the public's inability to think or feel. Glossy punks make millions rewriting Ramones songs for TRL and thirty-something supervisors who haven't lost their edge, dude. The Sex Pistols reunited for a greatest hits tour. The Dead Kennedys sued each other—sued each other—over the right to sell "Holiday In Cambodia" as a Levi's jingle. Ever intrigued by Afros on Anglos ("Angros"), the nation continues its morbid nostalgia for '70s grotesque. The truest tragedy is that the Ramones didn't all die years ago, before VH1 rated their greatness below the Bee Gees, before MTV was even a glimmer in the devil's eye. Lymphoma didn't kill Joey Ramone; Carson "Carcinogen" Daly killed Joey Ramone.

Contemporary pop stars who dare claim the Ramones as "inspiration"—the Dream girls, for instance--obviously mistook the band's playful simplicity for bullying stupidity (yet again the defining characteristic of rock 'n' roll radio). On that note, and with a sighing heart, I close with a haiku:

Britney and Justin—
Their limp last words to Joey,
"Gabba Gabba Hey"

Copyright © 2001 Juan-Jose Pichardo. All Rights Reserved.