The Ramones and Rap: A Shared History

Forty years after the Ramones’ debut album, punk and hip-hop continue to riff off one another

By Steven Lee Beeber

Forty years ago, the Ramones released their debut album. At around the same time, DJ Kool Herc began packing the clubs of the Bronx. Both events happened in New York. And both helped transform music history. Yet, for too long they’ve been seen as all but unrelated.

In an article in Complex, journalist Lauretta Charlton notes that there is a growing exchange between punk and hip-hop. “Whether it’s Tyler, The Creator calling OFWGKTA a punk band, Kanye West becoming a self-professed ‘new wave’ artist, or Lil Wayne infusing his tracks with subtle punk influences, rap culture is experiencing a renewed interest in punk.” This exchange can also be seen in so-called punk-rap bands like HO99O9 (pronounced Horror) and The White Mandingos (founded by former Bad Brains bassist Darryl Jenifer and the rapper Murs), just as it can in the mashups played by a growing legion of turntablists such as Peyote Cody, who helped pioneer the layering of rap vocals over punk instrumentals.

While this exchange may be picking up speed, it isn’t new. Blondie recorded with Fab Five Freddy (Rapture), Public Enemy with Sonic Youth (Kool Thing), and The Beastie Boys smoothly transitioned from a hardcore band to a rap outfit. Punk and hip-hop emerged together.

Tyler, the Creator says OFWGKTA is a punk band/ Courtesy of Incase via Wiki Commons

Why, then, has the relationship between punk and hip-hop been obscured for so long? Perhaps it’s because of our conventional way of reading pop-music history and the identities associated with it. It’s all in black and white, all about African rhythms and European melodies coming together to form jazz and rock ’n’ roll before breaking apart into punk and hip-hop. We see nothing but race: the white Rimbaud-haired rebels without a cause, sneering at the system, and the black bling-bearing magnum-drinkers, clutching bills while dancing to scratched out tunes.

“Red, yellow, black, white, or brown, in our own way, we can knock it down … just boogie to the beat of the funky sound” – Grandmaster Flash

Ironically, our persistent division between punk juvenile delinquents (JDs) and rap turntablists (DJs) runs counter to the aims of both groups. The punks and the hip-hoppers were trying to transcend labels. As Richard Hell explained about his song “Blank Generation,” the punks weren’t apathetic, they were just sick of being reduced to one category of identity — they were declaring themselves blank. Or as Grandmaster Flash advised when he told his audience to dance outside the racial category box: “Red, yellow, black, white, or brown, in our own way, we can knock it down … just boogie to the beat of the funky sound.”

America has always been about the gray areas more than the monochromatic ones, and that’s nowhere truer than in punk and hip-hop. Born in a city emblematic of the American melting pot, they emerged during our nation’s bicentennial — a year in which, ironically, many were losing faith. In 1976, New York was on the verge of bankruptcy and many of its neighborhoods looked post-apocalyptic. The Bronx of DJ Kool Herc saw as many as three buildings a day torched for insurance money, while in the Bowery, the stomping grounds of the Ramones, strung out junkies were as common as arson fires. Separated by mere subway stops, the musical genres shared many similarities. Both came out of street cultures past and hearkened to their eras. At the same time, both were self-consciously aware of this backward glance, and so were ironic. If they were disdainful of sentimentality, they were also romantic in the sense that they wanted to try everything. They were hyped up and ready for it all. In other words, they were like classic New Yorkers.

The Ramones were both the quintessential New Yorkers and the quintessential punks. Fast, angry, and negative, they began many of their two-minute songs with the words “I don’t wanna.” Yet, strip away the speeded-up rhythms and the glue-sniffing sentiments and the Ramones sound like nothing more than a street-corner doo-wop group, and look like nothing other than leather-jacketed JDs. Same goes for the leather-jacketed Jewish kids in The Dictators with their jokey fake Italian names (Ross the Boss Funicello) and for Blondie’s Debbie Harry, a bad girl straight out of The Shangri-Las. Even the poet Patti Smith, who formed her band with Lenny Kaye over a shared love of doo-wop, wrote songs about switchblade-baring hoods while setting them against joyous 60s nuggets like “Land of a Thousand Dances.”

On some level, none of this is surprising. We always knew that, to a degree, early punk was an in-joke, a knowing commentary on its own gangland, retro-kitsch, 50s/60s rock heyday bit. What is surprising in retrospect is how similar the impulses of early hip-hop were. Born not far from CBGB’s home in the Bowery, the largely Bronx-based movement was as much a product of its time — and its backward glance from it — as it was a revolutionary step forward.

DJ Kool Herc with James Brown’s “Sex Machine” double album in 1999/ Courtesy of Mika Väisänen via Wiki Commons

If the Ramones were the perfect representatives for punk, DJ Kool Herc was the same for hip-hop. Living with his parents in a housing project in the Bronx, he too kept alive a street-based musical tradition — yet, in his case, he did so in even more literal terms. Before headlining clubs, he took his turntable to the corner park and tapped into a streetlight for power, creating vast parties in which he lifted songs from their sources and recombined them into new sounds. At the same time, like the Ramones, he speeded up the rhythm of these old songs by emphasizing their beats above everything else. Taking the drum breaks and looping them to repeat, then layering those beats upon other similarly looped beats, he created extended jams that kept people dancing while also helping them pound out their frustrations.

While bands like the Ramones reduced instrumentation to its bare basics (“They can’t even play their guitars”), the early DJs who rapped at street parties did away with instruments altogether. The turntable was their instrument in part because they couldn’t afford better, but also because they were playing around with what had been recorded. If Patti Smith, The Dictators, and the Ramones used their encyclopedic knowledge of rock to quote, jazz-musician-style, from old songs, the DJs of hip-hop quoted on a literal level, lifting samples and restructuring them in new ways. In doing so, they created a patchwork quilt from the past, one that recalled the glories of musical forbearers while seeing the latent possibilities in revising their sentiments for the present. That’s why James Brown’s “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” though a No. 1 hit upon its release in 1968, has perhaps had its widest impact in Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.” Its words, paired with Chuck D’s invective and a ruthlessly insistent beat, become much more confrontational.

Ultimately, in looking to a collective musical past, both punk and hip-hop helped break down the color line. As Will Hermes, author of “Love Goes to Buildings On Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever,” says, “Art doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it’s a big-ass dialogue. Kool Herc defined his sound in part with ‘Apache’ by the Incredible Bongo Band, which had plenty of Caucasian blood; the Ramones covered The Ronettes, Chris Montez, and The Chambers Brothers. Great artists listen widely and steal from everywhere.”

Amid economic collapse, punk and hip-hop were born to reassess our national myths. Punk took the elitism of prog rock and made it democratic by trading it for early rock’s DIY. At the same time, hip-hop subverted the smooth grooves of disco by pumping them back through a multicultural stew of funk, rock, and other basic beats. Both dispensed with the “professionalism” of an entitled few, returning music to the common people in the streets. In doing so, they channeled the frustration of trying times through rhythm, getting their audiences up and dancing to a new cultural identity.

Are punk and hip-hop finally acknowledging one another? Maybe. Or maybe they never stopped doing so. The DJs of hip-hop and the JDs of punk were always kicking it old school — really old school — so as to move ahead in new ways.

Steven Lee Beeber is the author of “The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk” (Chicago Review Press), the editor of “AWAKE! A Reader for the Sleepless” (Soft Skull Press), and the associate editor of the literary journal Conduit. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, Spin, and The New York Times, among others. He teaches creative writing and creative nonfiction at Lesley University and GrubStreet.

Featured video: Sonic Youth’s “Kool Thing” featuring Chuck D of Public Enemy. © 2004 Geffen Records. Feature image by Denis O’Regan/CORBIS.