Tone and Style
The song's lyrics, with their explicitly serious content, are a departure from the Ramones' usual style. Spin's Jon Young calls it "part exorcism and part slapstick comedy". David Corn describes the beginning of the refrain—"Bonzo goes to Bitburg/then goes out for a cup of tea/As I watched it on TV/somehow it really bothered me"—as "snarled" by Joey over a "power-pop beat and melodic hooks galore". Salon.com arts editor Bill Wyman writes of Johnny Ramone "lob guitar bombs" amid the song's "Spectorian, rushing production" and of "Joey's pained, pleading voice". Douglas Wolk fits the song into his general view of Joey Ramone as different from his many musical imitators in that "he never, ever sneered": "the tone of 'Bonzo Goes to Bitburg'", writes Wolk, "isn't contemptuous, just confused and angry."
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Famous quotes containing the words tone and, tone and/or style:
“Whose are the truly labored sentences? From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month’s labor in the farmer’s almanac, to restore our tone and spirits.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There was about all the Romans a heroic tone peculiar to ancient life. Their virtues were great and noble, and these virtues made them great and noble. They possessed a natural majesty that was not put on and taken off at pleasure, as was that of certain eastern monarchs when they put on or took off their garments of Tyrian dye. It is hoped that this is not wholly lost from the world, although the sense of earthly vanity inculcated by Christianity may have swallowed it up in humility.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“I would observe to you that what is called style in writing or speaking is formed very early in life while the imagination is warm, and impressions are permanent.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)