Ramones – Too Tough To Die (Blue Cloudy Vinyl, Vinyl Me Please)

The Ramones’ Too Tough To Die is often positioned as a return to form for the band, but today, forty years since its release, their eighth studio album seems worthy of a far more radical categorization. In the musical landscape of the mid-1980s, the album was incoherent — not in a pejorative sense, but in how it reflected the paradoxes of its time. Made without a steady compass, the album’s incongruity became its center, and it holds. As Joey Ramone said in a 1988 interview: “Around ’84, the world was changing drastically with Iran and Gadaffi and all this stuff. Things were getting scary. So, our songs started changing.”

Echoing the surrounding instability, the Ramones created an album so layered, complex, and challenging that it can still be hard to pin down, even after four decades to ponder its songs. Too Tough To Die’s legacy lives in its chameleon-like textures, moods, and vocal styles — from the lofty to the sneering, from the cynical to the sentimental. Too Tough to Die was a reminder that it was the Ramones who initially inspired and influenced the Sex Pistols, not the other way around. If the word could be claimed by anyone, punk belonged to them.