Initial Negative Critical Reception

“You look at the audience and they think you’re from Mars” -Johnny Ramone (Green).

Despite the Ramones finding great success in the punk rock niche, it took longer for the larger public to warm up to their music. Like a number of their tracks, “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” found more success on the UK charts (making it into the Top 40 there vs. #81 on the US’s Billboard Hot 100) despite the band embodying what journalist Jim Green described as “a primo ultra-American essence of teenbeat” in his 1979 interview with the band (Green).

Why weren’t the Ramones popular in the US?

Some of the Ramones’s efforts to increase their profile only hurt them more. For example, they opened for bands with solid adult fanbases such as Toto and Black Sabbath in rural areas with basically nonexistent punk scenes (Green). Because of this, many people who saw them live as an opening act began to treat them as a joke, gaining them a level of notoriety with American rock fans. According to Green’s interview, the Ramones internalized the jeers of these crowds. In response to the disapproval of adult “couples on dates” that made fun of their opening performances, the Ramones identified increasingly with misunderstood teenagers (Green).

When opening for rock acts such as Black Sabbath, The Ramones encountered unwelcoming rock fans with a distaste for punk. These rockers, holding up a shirt saying “KILL A PUNK FOR ROCK & ROLL,” are a perfect example (Mayobat).

As Jim Green described in his article, radio play defined a good deal of artists’ American success in the late 1970s (Green). The negative impressions that the Ramones made on rock fans spread to radio programmers, who Green noted in 1979 “still toss each new Ramones record in the garbage can” (Green). At that point, the band had released five records with especially catchy singles in hopes of making it on air, “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” being one of those singles.

What did this mean to The Ramones?

Lying in Green’s illustration is a key piece of the argument: the Ramones catered to American youth. The lyrics of “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” highlight this distinction: the ideal punk, Sheena, runs off to join the New York scene because “New York City really has it all.” Their strong desire to ‘make it big’ with teens in their own country made their low airplay and negative reputation in music journalism all the more damning, as teenagers not already in urban punk scenes couldn’t hear the Ramones’s music if they weren’t on the airwaves or celebrated in magazines. The Ramones later sought to reach teenage audiences through appearing in the film Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, hoping that their roles in it would show teenage audiences the Ramones were on their side (Green).