Sunday, April 24, 2016

The Ramones at the Queens Museum

The Ramones’ first album released forty years ago in 1976.  To honor the Ramones who are originally from Forest Hills, Queens, the Queens museum presents Hey! Ho! Let’s Go: Ramones and the Birth of Punk, about the Ramones’ groundbreaking punk influence. 

The exhibition initiates with their first encounter with each other at Forest Hills High School in the late 1960s.  Tommy (Tome Erdelyi) realized the potential in the four original Ramones as a musical group.  By the early 1970s they started performing at CBGB, a biker bar on the Bowery, New York City.  CBGB was their initial public platform to declare what punk meant.  The exhibition epitomizes their public yet personal lives.  Joey (Jeffrey Hyman) ’s high school doodles embody naïve and fun characteristics of his.  Along with the Ramones’ belongings such as clothes, handwritings, and instruments, the exhibition features album covers to passports.


The show concludes with the Ramones’ performance screening in their most glorious days.  Because the generation of punk was before my time, I only have an idea of the impact they made in the world.  The finale of the exhibition lets viewers experience emotion and tension of the Ramones.  Although it was indirect, I was able to feel their impression in the society in their time.


2 comments:

  1. I think something is missing in the opening sentence. “The Ramones’ first album WAS released…”. There plenty of repetition, in the first paragraph you repeat “Ramones” 4 times, and the word “ Queens” two times.

    In the second paragraph, you describe the exhibition and their career concisely, it’s clear and informs the reader.

    In the third paragraph you say “Because the generation of punk was before my time, I only have an idea of the impact they made in the world.” I think this is too personal and does not add any kind of information. You could find out their importance by researching the influence they had in people older than you. Overall I think you wrote a clear and objective review.

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  2. Initiates isn’t the right word in, “The exhibition initiates,” – it doesn’t initiate something, it just begins (however, you could say The Ramones initiated the punk movement). “Their first encounter with each other” could read easier as “Their (or you could say the band’s) first meeting at…” From your description in the second paragraph I don’t get a clear idea of what “punk meant,” You say that punk was represented visually in the show, but I want to know what that looked like – why were their clothes, handwritings, etc… so important to the movement?. You also say that the final screening allowed you to experience the emotion and tension of the Ramones – what are those emotions and those tensions? What was their “impression in society?” How does that impression have lasting effect today?

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