Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: We're Outta Here!

Theme: R.A.M.O.N.E.S - Ramones ft. Lemmy (the narrator from Tromeo & Juliet)

Actual punks pass righteous judgement on the posersphere.

The first Ramones album I ever heard was the live album of their final show. When I went back and heard their OG studio recordings, they seemed way too slow. This is because the Ramones kept playing faster as they went along, with the result that by the end they less resembled that orangutan trying to hammer nails in that one video you've all seen and more resembled Travis the chimp on the fateful day of his gamer uprising.

This is because Johnny, the reactionary chud who invented the punk guitar style*, also forced the band to wear their signature uniform leather jackets and bent his efforts toward endlessly refining and perfecting the sound now most ripped off in all pop music history. I know it's fashionable to pretend prog was actually gr8 and punk ruined everything, but you're wrong on that, and the posers who immediately co-opted punk are right: two-minute songs that sound like Dennis Hopper wilding on that log with a chainsaw are the Platonic form of rock, and everything good about prog found its correct expression in the metal of Crimson Glory, Queensrÿche and Megadeth.

But as much as the sound saved rock from disappearing up its ass completely, it would never have transcended gimmickry without the songwriting, which is funnier than any imitator to this day. The greatest lyric ever written isn't "Scaramouche, can you do the fandango" (???) or "I'll see you on the dark side of the moon"; it's "now I guess I'll have to tell 'em/that I got no cerebellum" from DDT abuse cautionary tale "Teenage Lobotomy". A thousand monkeys on typewriters would replicate the works of Shakeƒpeare twenty times before they'd write something that good. Likewise, "Cretin Hop" consigns your attempts and mine at political incorrectness to the tryhard penalty box of shame. But it's not just the household-name hits that are on parade here: hardcore dabble "Wart Hog" makes the cut along with "The Crusher" from Dee Dee's epochally bizarre rap album. The most inexplicable choice is to end the set (and their career as a band) with a cover of "Any Way You Want It", but it wouldn't be the Ramones if they didn't throw a questionable curveball at the moment least expected.

It is a testament to their singularity that the most ripped-off band in history's like will somehow simultaneously never be beheld again on Earth. Everyone gets one time-machine gig to attend, and this one would be mine, after I was done giving thalidomide to famous boxers' mothers and planting a rotary telephone in Ötzi the ice man's cave.

*We will entertain no hipster ackshyouwallys of any kind.