1-2-3-4!

Like most obsessions, this list started innocently enough in the summer of 2011, when I was daily commuting across the city of Dortmund, Germany. One morning I noticed that my journey had begun and ended with a song from my iPod that namechecked the Ramones. One of those songs will have been familiar to a lot of people (“Ask Her For Adderall” by The Hold Steady), the other was fiendishly obscure (“Too Much Jazz” by The Beat Angels).

I wondered how much of a coincidence that was. On the one hand, it all seemed rather unlikely. After all, how many bands devote songs to other bands in the first place? On the other hand, I knew there were a couple of additional recordings on my mobile device that explicitly mentioned the Bruddas, such as “As Long As I Can Listen” by The Dubrovniks (from Sydney) and Sleater-Kinney’s “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone”, not to mention a famous Motorhead ditty. So it wasn’t totally outrageous that I had happened to hear two songs that paid homage to the Ramones while in shuffle mode.

But how many such songs were there? I racked my brains, asked around, googled a bit and quickly came up with 25. That was so impressive, I felt, that I posted a Facebook note about my research. It immediately led to further suggestions from friends of mine and just a few months later I had compiled 100 tunes.

At the time, I was in touch with someone who worked for a maverick culture website from England called Sabotage Times, and they were happy to publish my list. And the others. Because over the next three years, between early 2012 and March 2015, the collection steadily grew to 400 songs. Anybody who knows the band will realise why this was a good number to end the project on, not least because it was getting increasingly difficult to find additional songs.

Still, every once in a while one would trickle in, and so five years later my list stood at 444. Which struck me as another nice number. Too nice, I thought, to let this opportunity pass by. Sabotage Times had since shut down, so I got in touch with the people who ran a suitably offbeat Australian website called Shoot Farken, and they gave the list a new home for a number of years. Also, it was Athos from Shoot Farken who had the idea of providing YouTube links for as many songs as possible "to give people a more sonic experience". I'm indebted to his groundwork.

Now, five years later, I have tried to carry on in his tradition. Because in December of 2025, I stumbled across song number 500. Guess what, Shoot Farken was now also lying dormant (not a Curse of the List, I hope), so I figured it was about time to get my own domain and publish this thing myself. Including hyperlinks to every song. If the song in question wasn't on YouTube, I tried to find it on Bandcamp, Soundcloud or Spotify. In the very few cases where even these platforms came up emtpy, I added a Discogs link so that you know the song really exists (and where to find it).

As always, this list follows three basic rules:

1. Only one song per band or singer. (Helen Love, a group from Wales, have devoted almost half a dozen songs to the Ramones.)

2. The songs must really namecheck the Ramones or an individual Ramone. (Hence, no instrumentals such as Guitar Wolf’s “Kung Fu Ramone” or the U2 song which is about Joey but neglects to mention him.)

3. No cover versions. (To give you but one example, apart from the song's title, “Johnny Ramone” by Der Nino aus Wien has nothing in common with “Johnny Ramone” by Some Cat From Japan and “Johnny Ramone” by Santiago Delgado Y Los Runaway Lovers or the other songs called "Johnny Ramone" in this list.)

And now … let's go. 1,2,3,4!

Uli Ramone, February 2026