Of course, we used to say: “It’s the ones who’ve cracked that the light shines through.” Needs re-working this adage, bequeathed to us by Leonard Cohen, via Jeffrey Lewis. Needs stripping of its misleading naiveté. I always picture a roof, a roof with a great big crack in it. It’s only under a broken roof you can absorb what’s actually going on outside the safety of your hermetically sealed sanctum. The ones who are cracked let the light in, sure, from time to time, when it’s light out, when the weather’s decent. But for the most part, as in Cobain’s case, the ones who are cracked also let in the damp, the rain, the drawn-out black chill of winter. I’m guessing Cohen was at least vaguely aware of this dilemma. That with truth, comes discomfort. All the same, I didn’t hear it like that at age 18. Crack = integrity. That’s all I heard. It would have been nice if there’d been a disclaimer.

I’ve been doing a lot of interviews recently, on the promo trail for a new album, and people frequently ask me if starting a band is a good idea, as if I’m an authority on the subject. The situation was bad enough decades ago, I tell them. Damaging enough. Unhealthy enough. Back then — pre-web, pre-Spotify deciding you deserve nothing — people were still crushing their minds chasing the dream, but they at least had the homes they’d bought through record sales to overdose in when the time came. They had space for failure both professional and personal. The more an artist is given the room to fail, the greater the capacity for success. But artists are no longer worth anything in society. The licence we formally granted them is gone. We’ve given up on Cohen’s maxim entirely. If you’re cracked, you probably need to be therapised out of existence.

I don’t want to come off negative. There is a good side to playing in a group, even in this dark, offensively inoffensive period of paint-by-numbers indie vapidity. It’s just I despise the good side even worse than the bad. It’s like with drugs, the high should bear the weight of your resentment, not the come down. The come down is your friend. The come down might stop you from mugging yourself forever. The high is what deforms you. The first 117 gigs I performed were dogshit bar one. All I was doing was rolling around town humiliating myself in pubs. Then some night you chance upon a small crowd that will go batshit for pretty much anything. And then your life as you knew it is over. You will never make it to adulthood. You will crave that fix until you’re dead. You will hanker for it whether you have anything to say or not. The art will frequently come second. The love, the delicious adulation, will come first.

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Punk's spirit is broken

By Lias Saoudi

These articles, the book I co-wrote, my journals, they are the beginnings of an exit strategy, a literary life raft with which I hope to salvage something bearable from the coming storm of middle age. Something that doesn’t demand my having to Frankenstein myself, to enmesh myself with the hopes, dreams and dreary shortcomings of others to make my living. That’s actually the worst of it. Especially if the people you’ve got on the squad are arguably even more cracked than you are. How your identities get all molten and confused. This character splicing is of course also what makes a great band. Once you merge, stylistically, spiritually, philosophically, you can act and think as one. This is of great use to you, what with your trying to keep time, and cultivate a strong group aesthetic. Nirvana for instance, they don’t sound like a few guys, they sound like one guy. The problems truly begin when this bizarre soul congealment bears real-world fruit, and a murderous over-excitement begins to brew. Long-forgotten personal boundaries have no hope of re-emerging in the sudden climate of smash-and-grab opportunism.

Becoming an artist is all about access to irresponsibility. With irresponsibility often comes marginality sure, but at least you get out in the open. Those who compute the world aesthetically — the overly sensitive — clock very early on in life that the price of civilisation is this incredibly dull thing called repression, and they start trying to hustle their way out of that agreement accordingly. I will live by my imagination. My contribution will be the uniqueness of my very persona. This might demand your sinking into squalid self-absorption and penury, but at least the future will bear your signature. That is unless you drift into the notion that maybe you should start a band. In which case, the future will bear several signatures. Whose signature has more prominence will almost certainly become an issue. Because being in a band means that you have to share everything.

I don’t consider myself a musician. Not really. I can play, a bit. I’m more of a performance artist. A performance artist and a lyric whore. Music is just the medium with which I happen to earn rent money. More than any other type of artist, musicians are eternal children. It’s why so many of them — like Cobain — don’t make it past 27. And the bigger the star, the more freakish the Peter Pan syndrome should things drag on too long, Michael Jackson being the prime example, who went as far as actually building his own personal Neverland. There’s nothing comparable in any other medium.

But consider the talent these people are lumbered with. If you can coast through life by simply making sounds, why develop the rest of your brain? Music, to paraphrase Schopenhauer, is not like the other arts, it isn’t an intermediary between idea and will, but will itself. Everything else is just tracing shadows on sheafs of paper and rolls of film. Music transcends all that pedantry, any causal notion of law and logic. It is primeval. Pre-verbal. A realm of pure intuition.

What happens when these beings of pure will club together in groups will always be of some fascination to the general public. The paradox is too severe, bears too much sweet schadenfreude. Failure is the key component in comedy, and few things are so rich in failure. The widescreen interpersonal schisms — they quench an egotistical demand for high drama within the group, and a perverse love of watching other people fail outside of it. But: to live outside the law, you must be honest, as Bobby D sang. Your freakishness, of which you made a song and dance, of which you demanded the world celebrate, is now inescapable, calcified, permanent. You will be known henceforth by the crudely rendered cartoons you elaborated to replace yourselves. Your alter ego, initially your deliverance from unadulterated boredom, you soon find to be nothing less than the guarantee of your permanent exile. It’s important to remember that this is what you wanted. I have a feeling that it’s something the Nirvana frontman tried very hard to forget.

Luckily, we’re reaching the end of the band era. The further we roll from its heyday, the more I reckon my incredibly meagre stock is likely to rise. Once all of the old guard finally croak, people will turn to the only dregs they have left. The last turds on the block. Against my better judgement, I hope to be among those turds. There will only be a handful of us left, the real deal who went out and properly fucked up our lives on account of a few hooks and the odd Nazi-themed video.

For the most part, “rock and roll” today feels like a silly turn of phrase. A euphemism out of time, it means “hard on then move on”. Not exactly the vibe anymore. The medium has been reduced to a middle-class pageant for people who fancy a little more colour in their lives. I can’t remember the last person to really let the light in, the light and the drizzle and the dark. That’s because folks aren’t steeped in enough dysfunction. It sickens me, the politesse and consideration with which some of these new-fangled groups conduct themselves. The endless groaning about mental health. You’re supposed to break your soul. Any band worth its salt is a machine for cultivating and harbouring cracked souls.

To refute the systemisation of utterly everything at the price of full social ostracisation, there is no stronger aesthetic. To tell yourself the world is flat and live accordingly, because you feel ontologically more at home in a world with a beginning and an end, a world that looks and feels like a story… few things take more guts in an age as brutally formulaic as this one. Idiocy, drug abuse, infantilism, depression, schizophrenia, these are not ailments, these are the price of resistance. These are the bravest symptoms of a worldwide disease one might call metaphysical nihilism. A disease that insists on the supplanting of reality with a quantification of reality. A band is a machine for arrested development, and what could be more crucial than an arrestation of development in a world that can’t switch itself off, even as — to lift from Cobain’s final words — it chooses to burn out, rather than fade away?

I could see the name registered on some level. So I asked if they knew the band I meant. “Yeah, actually I do know the band. I saw them play in Liverpool a while back, around 2015.” What did you make of them? “I thought they were great, until I noticed the lead singer was wearing this T-shirt with a joke about The Sun on it, and I just thought ‘what an absolute fucking prick’, you don’t come to Liverpool and make jokes about The Sun.”

I think I remember this controversy, I informed him. Wasn’t that T-shirt a kind of satirical mock up of a Sun front page? As in, the headline today is simply “consume more stuff”? “Nah man,” he replied, “and even if it was, in Liverpool, you don’t fuck with that. He should have known better. Have some fucking respect laa.” I’m pretty certain it was an anti-Sun T-shirt, I countered. “Nah man, it wasn’t, seriously.” Oh, I really think that it was. “How’d you know that for sure?” I was the bloke wearing the T-shirt.

This swiftly led to a five-way argument with the Scouse contingent. Seeing as any practical justification I offered up — the T-shirt said “The Sun, keep fucking buying” on it — was swatted away with waspish urgency, I reverted back to form: even if I hadn’t been in the middle of an eight-year bender, I told them petulantly, even if I’d soberly clocked the unfortunate local significance of the thing before taking to the stage, I would still have worn the shirt. They were scowling now. “So, you’re not even sorry?” I don’t want to patronise my audience, I informed them, I’m not going to water myself down for anyone either. There is no conspiracy so sinister as morality, I added, with deliberate pretentiousness. My job is to get you to ask questions. Art isn’t here to shepherd you along to a more positive perspective in life.

But my arguments were evidently beyond the pale. This group of young people couldn’t compute the absence of literalism. I would once have felt quite proud that I had been able to confuse people so permanently by simply wearing a T-shirt. Intentional or not, I would normally find this kind of outrage objectively comical. But there was something in their unanimity that was vaguely inspiring. Where else have people managed to club together and successfully banish that red rag of Murdoch-sponsored hatred? Was I fighting the wrong battle here? Either way, he eventually refused me the roll-up I’d asked for.

When the Fat White Family set out as a band around 12 years ago, we had few objectives beyond wilful abrasion. We saw the music industry — shrivelled after the streaming boom — as primarily concerned with little more than its own survival. Indie music featuring guitars had become so droll, so bitterly inoffensive and stale, that, as fans, it was difficult not to take it personally. The flipside of that — the positive, if you like — was that even through an endless fog of speed abuse, Glen’s vodka and unresolved childhood trauma, it was easy to spot a gap in the market for something genuinely discomforting. Our idols were Lou Reed, The Fall, The Make Up and The Country Teasers — wanton outsiders who turned politics into playdough in lieu of their aesthetic objectives. These people were world-builders, not box-tickers.

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I’m approaching 40 now. Life has slapped me down repetitively; it has beaten plenty of moderation into me. My taste for shock tactics has diminished considerably. Today, I’m more prone to dabbling in sentimentality. But for a protracted period during the middle of the previous decade, my organ-grinding little brother and I found ourselves seriously considering anally fingering one another on stage. Even GG Allin, perhaps the most extreme frontman that ever lived, had never committed himself to live incest. I look back on these discussions now as the high-water mark in a take-no-prisoners exploration of the contemporary limitations of the stage itself. I wanted to become the Vito Acconci of rock and roll. One of Egon Schiele’s self portraits brought to life.

When I think of the word “punk”, the first things that spring to mind are mohawks and circles with a capital “A” drawn in the middle. But if we think of punk more generally as an aesthetic of dissidence, a counter to the status quo, what does it mean today? Where can it possibly bloom?

Maybe it was an excess of freedom that brought it on, but we seem now to live in an era of taboo-building, of rapidly expanding moral expectations, but one that refuses to offer people anything sensual in return. In essence, punk entails a certain amount of aesthetic juvenilia. Where punk is concerned, problem and solution are often one and the same: a lack of restraint can often prove the key to authenticity. A project defines itself by going too far. Until it has gone too far, it quite simply isn’t. It is transcendence in the wrong direction — it is only by painting yourself into a corner that you are forced to paint yourself out.

Apparently, this mode of cultural production now causes more agony than it’s worth. With an ever-tightening fist of critical rigidity, well-meaning purveyors of carefully cultivated static carry the day. Artists are now expected to live comfortably with the fetid anxiety that, at any moment, their already paltry livelihoods might be stripped away from them on account of some antiquated faux pas on Facebook. Maybe some new media ecosystem will coalesce around the mainstream, where young people can get things gloriously wrong for a spell, but I doubt it.

The problems are too fundamental. The birth of social media has lumbered us with an apparently fatal dose of accessibility, of democratisation: everyone in charge of their own little publishing house, their own micro-judiciary, each one a captain of industry at the infinitesimal scale. There aren’t enough shadows within which groups can get fungal. Everything is out in the world before it’s had a chance to properly malform. Meanwhile, the space separating self from all the rest has been obliterated. The upshot of this suffocating proximity? Alienation, and fear.

Back when I was utterly broke, trying to get into music, I got scouted by a modelling agency. This agency had me cycling all over London chasing fantastical sums of money in exchange for a few hours pouting. I didn’t land a single job. The only “work” I ever managed to land was unpaid, for a Japanese fashionista in east London. There was no money, but the agency assured me I had to build my portfolio. I spent four hours in front of a mirror being rendered in full geisha make-up, then had my photo taken incessantly wearing a piece of linen before being cast out into the weekend.

The garb brought another me to the surface, a new kind of tenderness that Friday night. And two years ago, I made a video for the DIY acid house side project I front, Decius, in which I decided to resurrect that geisha alter ego. The video budget amounted to around £70, as chipped in for by me and the bloke cooking the beats, all of which was spent hiring a young make-up artist I’d found online. The song is called “U Instead of Thought” (Watch the video: you’ll be able to see for yourself that she did an incredible job.) The whole project is an exploration of my masochistic tendencies, an aestheticisation of my will to subjection.

Days after, the artist in question got back in touch with me to remind me to credit her when the film dropped. Of course, I replied. A day or two later, she decided she didn’t want her name on the thing, that maybe the video constituted an act of cultural appropriation. I was a little bemused at this — a great many little Algerian boys dream of growing up to become geishas — but fair enough, your call, I replied. Then she changed tack again; actually, she did want the credit. Then, days later, she made her final decision: it was too risky, the video constituted some vague kind of harm and she didn’t want the association after all. That only around 500 people were ever likely to see the thing didn’t matter.

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By Geoff Dyer

I brought up Flaubert’s comments on plagiarism, who regarded his own work as always nothing more than a bouquet of other people’s ideas. There are only two types of art: good and bad. Of course, good art can be put to bad ends; Leni Riefenstahl made great films for the worst people. I asked the make-up artist what she made of the blues? The bedrock of pop music. Should a barrier have been erected between black and white? She responded with a viral video of a young Asian guy attributing the racist attack he had endured on the London Underground to the prevalence of Kung-Fu thematics in Western pop culture.

Such moral urgency has supplanted spontaneity in the arts. As much as I found the make-up artist’s extreme prevaricating humorous, I recognised enough of myself in it. The endless doubt that now accompanies every outré aesthetic choice I make. Above all else, I felt sorry for her. Sorry for all of us. Are we slowly denying ourselves access to the architecture of self-knowing? As artists, are we really expected to choose between impotence and extreme marginality?

If one takes into account the serious critical acclaim heaped upon Harry Styles, it seems so. If one takes into account the even more serious journalism that props up The 1975, all is surely lost. I’ve seen the future; it is an eternal corporate skid-mark of pseudo-personality and pragmatic hypocrisy. Where provocation for provocation’s sake is concerned, the stakes are unbearably high, the competition non-existent. The orgy of self-censorship that is our historical portion thus ends here: in screaming silence.

That one idea was at once reactionary and revolutionary. The Ramones reduced rock’n’roll to its core values (loud, fast, catchy, fun) and spiked it with the stink and danger of 1970s New York, thus inventing punk rock. Recorded in just a few days, their 1976 debut album squeezed 14 songs into 29 minutes, none of them grazing the three-minute mark. What’s more, these four men from Forest Hills, Queens — 1, 2, 3, 4! — styled themselves as a tight-knit street gang. They were the Beatles for people who thought the Beatles peaked in Hamburg in 1962, when they wore black leather, chomped amphetamines and got into punch-ups.

Now they are all gone. Like the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Motörhead, the Ramones belong to that small, unlucky category of bands who have no surviving members from their classic line-up. Frontman Joey Ramone (Jeffrey Hyman) died in 2001 from lymphoma; bassist Dee Dee (Douglas Colvin) in 2002 from a heroin overdose; Johnny (John Cummings) in 2004 from prostate cancer; and drummer/producer Tommy (Tamás Erdélyi) in 2014 from cancer of the bile duct.

The Ramones brand, however, has proved much more durable, thanks to their entrepreneurial designer Arturo Vega. He made their heraldic logo as recognisable as the Rolling Stones’s tongue by licensing it for use on pillowcases, licence plates, baby bibs and, of course, T-shirts, which you can currently buy in Primark.

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“They sold more T-shirts than records,” former manager Danny Fields told the New York Times when Vega died in 2013, “and probably they sold more T-shirts than tickets”. The fascination endures. Following the numerous tribute albums, the tribute songs, the Lower East Side street corner called Joey Ramone Place, and the absurd 40^th anniversary edition of their debut which is longer than the first five albums put together, there are now plans for a biopic, with comedian Pete Davidson as Joey.

Vega based the logo on the US presidential seal because, he said in 1993, they were “the ultimate all-American band… To me, they reflected the American character in general — an almost childish innocent aggression”. Though they were not technically all American (Dee Dee grew up in West Berlin and Tommy was a Jewish Hungarian), Vega was on to something. Even as they yearned for the sweet teenage kicks of early rock’n’roll, covering pre-Beatles hits by the likes of Bobby Freeman and Chris Montez, the Ramones had a thick streak of nihilistic brutality: a razor blade concealed in a wad of bubblegum. It was the dream of innocence combined with the reality of violence that made them truly American.

The Stooges and the New York Dolls heralded punk, but Joey’s voice, Johnny’s riffs, Dee Dee’s tunes and Tommy’s machine-gun beat forged the template. When they started playing shows in 1974, only pausing between songs if a fight broke out, people couldn’t tell if they were a serious band or a satire on rock’n’roll.

Photographer Roberta Bayley, who worked at New York’s punk crucible CBGB, remembered: “It was almost like conceptual art or something. It was so great that you couldn’t believe that it could exist.” The sleeve of their debut album alone — brick wall, leather jackets, ripped jeans — created an eternal template for grubby New York cool. When the Strokes arrived in 2001, shortly before Joey died, they looked like the Ramones if they had read Vogue and smelled nice.

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Bob Dylan doesn't like you

By Dorian Lynskey

The Ramones didn’t have entirely one-track minds. Dig into the lyrics on the debut alone and you’ll find references to Patty Hearst, CIA spies and World War Two. But their selling point was simplicity. They dug the trashy ephemera of the American century, from monster movies to cheeseburgers, and made the musical equivalent. They sang most often of desire and its opposite, crying I Wanna… (Sniff Some Glue, Be Your Boyfriend, Be Sedated) or I Don’t Wanna… (Go Down to the Basement, Walk Around with You, Fight Tonight). No title sums up punk’s foundational impulse better than 1978’s I Just Want to Have Something to Do.

Nobody could ever be that basic, and thus that accessible, again. When they played their first UK show on the unimprovable date of America’s bicentennial, members of the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Stranglers and the Damned flocked to see them because they got the message: If we can do this, so can you. Joey later clamed that the “Hey ho, let’s go!” chant in their debut single Blitzkrieg Bop was a call for listeners to start their own bands.

On one level, the Ramones were a classic four-cornered band. Tommy had the vision, Joey the misfit charisma, Dee Dee the tunes and Johnny the discipline. Beyond the stage and studio, however, they were stunningly dysfunctional. Joey was sickly and sensitive and suffered from OCD. Johnny was a monstrous control freak with a contempt for weakness, especially Joey’s. Dee Dee was a heroin-addicted chaos agent who dug Nazi memorabilia and claimed that “the Ramones stand for nothing but pure hate”. Tommy was fine but he quit in 1978 because he was “losing my mind” and his replacement, Marky Ramone, drank too much. Tommy once made a startling comment to author Steven Lee Beeber: “Growing up with fear of Holocaust, being with Johnny and Dee Dee was like living with danger.”

When the surviving members were inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, they sat at separate tables. The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis described the subsequent backbiting documentary End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones as “one of the bleakest films ever made about rock music, an unsettling cautionary tale about the benefits of quitting while you’re ahead”.

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By the same token, Johnny’s posthumously published Commando is perhaps the most unwittingly hilarious rock memoir I’ve ever read, cleanly dividing life into the things he loved (America, Elvis, Coca-Cola, baseball) and hated (pretty much everything else in the world). Fanatically incurious, he calls Andy Warhol’s Factory “a bunch of freaks”, the CBGB crowd “a bunch of assholes” and Stonehenge “a bunch of rocks”.

One of rock’s few arch-conservatives, he boasted of being a Republican from the age of 12. When Joey, who was Jewish and staunchly liberal, railed against Ronald Reagan’s visit to a German military cemetery in the 1985 song Bonzo Goes to Bitburg, a furious Johnny demanded that he change the title: “You can’t call my president a monkey!”

The Ramones thought that they deserved to be huge but it was not to be. They had no Top 40 hits in the US and only four in the UK, the biggest by far being a cover of the Ronettes’ Baby I Love You. It must have been hard, being outpaced not just by their peers but by their followers and, eventually, their followers’ followers. After the failure of their big crossover bid, 1980’s Phil Spector-produced End of the Century, they accepted that they had plateaued and became a punk-pop assembly line, as stolidly reliable as a burger chain. “A machine of habit,” Johnny called them.

On a purely aesthetic level, the Ramones would have been better off pulling the plug in 1978 after their first four albums. Their fidelity to their original sound and image meant that they could never grow up. Dee Dee bailed out in 1989, tired of “four middle-aged men trying to be teenage juvenile delinquents”. By that point, their tour bus had four separate compartments so that they didn’t have to talk to each other, Joey having never forgiven Johnny for stealing (and marrying) his girlfriend. Joey hit back, it is said, by writing The KKK Took My Baby Away.

Johnny thought his outrage ridiculous. Just imagine being on the road with someone you hate for that many years, only acknowledging each other’s existence for an hour a night. Johnny didn’t even visit Joey in hospital before he died, claiming that it would be hypocritical. In the documentary, he defends himself by saying he felt sad for a week.

The problem with writing about the Ramones is that the more you know, the sadder the story becomes. It’s easy to sneer at people who wear the T-shirt as a fashion statement without knowing the half of it but perhaps it is better to remember them as an imperial abstraction: one band, indivisible, with one perfect notion. The reality can break your heart.