PUNK ELITISM: There's a fascinating little piece in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine (an issue comprised entirely of tributes to deceased celebrities from 2002), that's written by Chuck Klosterman about two different rock stars who died within 24 hours of one another last April. Klosterman notes that while the passing of Ramones bassist Dee Dee Ramone got substantial media attention, the concurrent death of Robbin Crosby (guitarist for the '80s hair metal band Ratt) was all but ignored. This was despite Ratt's record of four platinum albums to the Ramones' zero and, as the author notes, "Crosby co-wrote a song ('Round and Round') that has probably been played on FM radio and MTV more often than every track in the Ramones' entire catalog."
So why the disparity? It's because the Ramones, according to hipster conventional wisdom, are "better," "more important," and most of all, "seminal." I myself of course rate the Ramones much higher than Ratt, but I do realize that this is a case of the good ol' East Coast Bias coming through once again- few NYC punk scenesters realize that the Ramones weren't nearly as highly regarded in most of the country as they were in New York.
Punk is supposed to be a reaction to elitism, but in this case (as in many others) it's proven to be the most elitist form of pop there is. New York and other big cities are filled with obnoxious hipsters who believe that punk is the only good music in the world, and that anyone who questions this fact is merely a "corporate sellout," or something of that ilk. After all, in the reaction/non-reaction to the Ramone and Crosby deaths, isn't the implication that more people may have listened to Ratt, but "better people" listened to the Ramones?
On the same subject, the punk/politics connection may have reached its all-time nadir last week when, after the death of The Clash's frontman Joe Strummer, National Review's group blog "The Corner" was deluged with a dozen or so pro-Clash tributes from its army of ultra-conservative writers. It was almost like they dusted off their "I disagreed with his politics, but he was a great man" speeches from November, substituting Strummer's name for Paul Wellstone's.