>The Ramones are terrible musicians, but locked into something our collective consciousness liked. You can't practice or engineer that. I don't have enough per

>The Ramones are terrible musicians, but locked into something our collective consciousness liked. You can't practice or engineer that. I don't have enough perspective to really know, but it seems to me the record companies were a lot better at identifying this ephemeral quality decades ago, and then pushing it into the mainstream. If the Ramones came around these days, they'd probably go nowhere, but back then someone figured out that people would like listening to their music and pulled the strings to get their music into the public consciousness. >But they are nobodies because they aren't capable of writing music people want to listen to. Yep. I've even seen this with plenty of well-known musicians over the years. They achieve fame as part of some band, but then they join up with some other top-tier musicians from other bands as part of a "supergroup", and the result is completely underwhelming: technically very good, but just not all that interesting to listen to. So, many times, it seems that the "magic" came from a particular combination of people writing music together, at a particular time.