To find your superpower just remove everything else
Back in the day when I was living in New York Fucking City (as it was still called back then), I met Joey Ramone, just before he died. I’d gone to see a mate play at the punk club Coney Island High on St Mark’s. Backstage afterwards, drinking free Jack Daniels (of course) and feeling very, very cool and every inch not like the agency planner that I was, somebody asked me if I wanted to meet Joey. In the din and grime of the after scene I hadn’t noticed him. But there he was, slumped in a battered armchair looking like a giant black spider. I was introduced. He shook my hand without getting up and asked “hey man, what did you think of the gig?” I was too starstruck to be aware of what came out of my mouth in that moment. Something the other day sparked memories of my time in NYC, and reliving that epic night got me thinking about the manic genius that was the Ramones.
When Johnny and Dee Dee decided to form a band in ’74, the rock scene was… a lot. It was full of philosophical and introspective lyrics, extended guitar solos, concept albums, fancy studio techniques, flamboyant costumes, and elaborate theatrical performances. The Ramones as they became, did something that was far more dangerous: they weaponised their musical limitations, stripped everything right down and played music that was very simple, very fast, and very human. Their songs were about the simplest of things - rebellion, youth, and love. Johnny played downstrokes like he was literally attacking the guitar and never once played a solo, Dee Dee delivered simple basslines with crushing sound and fury, while Tommy hammered out a relentless, no-frills rhythm. Johnny once said, “We play the hardest thing in the world: basic rock and roll.” Their look was as stripped-down as their sound - torn jeans, battered leather jackets, graphic tees, and sneakers. No glitter, and no glam.
They recorded fourteen songs in just eighteen days for their eponymous debut album. It delivered its full sonic payload in less than twenty-nine breathless minutes. With songs like songs like ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ and ‘Judy Is a Punk’ they took a barebones musical vocabulary and pushed it to its gloriously uncompromising limit. "A nonstop set of short, brisk, monochromatically intense songs," as John Rockwell of The New York Times wrote in his review, “the effect in the end amounts to an abstraction of rock so pure that other associations get left behind”. Paul Nelson in Rolling Stone observed that “The Ramones’ lyrics are so compressed that there is no room for even one establishing atmosphere verse or one dramatically irrelevant guitar solo in which the musicians could suggest an everyday existence”
Their superpower was ruthless, radical minimalism. Writing for GQ, Dylan Jones put it beautifully: “The Ramones were a law unto themselves: nerdy, recalcitrant and reductive in the best way possible. Using a methodical but instinctive process, the Ramones acted as though they were on a Cordon Bleu scholarship, boiling the rock’n’roll bouillabaisse until it thickened and intensified, allowing any unnecessary vapours to waft away to FM radio. The Ramones basically reinvented their genre through evaporation”. They didn’t expand rock’s universe - they shrunk it down into something you, me, anyone, could play in our garage. As Bono reflected in his Time magazine eulogy for Joey Ramone, “They stood for the idea of making your limitations work for you. In film jargon, they would be “a pure situation.” They talked like they walked like they sounded onstage. Everything added up. That takes an extraordinary intelligence to figure out.”
In finding out who they were, the Ramones blazed a path and gave permission to misfits, dropouts, and amateurs: you didn’t need training, you didn’t need approval. All you needed was urgency and a voice. Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy gave us proof that limitation can be liberation, that rawness can be revelation, and that sometimes, the simplest expression of truth is the loudest.
Contrast that clarity with how in marketing we overburden and overcomplicate our process and thinking with models, templates, formats, onions, pyramids, and keys; how we these stuff these constructs with acres of verbiage, mumbo jumbo, and platitudes; and how we then wonder why out there in the real world our brand lacks clarity, coherence, consistency, and dare one say it, excitement.
We should aspire to the standard that Bono spoke of - brands that talk, like they walk, like they perform, in which everything adds up. Want to find your brand’s true, compelling superpower, the true source of its value and magnetism in the world? Then strip it all back to just that, and that alone. Be the heartless truncator, the merciless editor, and take a scythe to the unwanted and unnecessary acres of fluff and bullshit.
Everybody has a superpower. And every business has a superpower. And every brand has a superpower. If they choose to find it. I just wish I could remember what I said to Joey that night.