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."
Read more about this topic: Bonzo Goes To Bitburg
Famous quotes containing the words tone and/or style:
“He doesn’t know a damn thing about China ... That’s what makes him an expert. He knows nothing about music, being tone deaf. That’s what makes him a musician ... And he’s batty in the head. That’s what makes him a philosopher.”
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
“We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)