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.”
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“A style does not go out of style as long as it adapts itself to its period. When there is an incompatibility between the style and a certain state of mind, it is never the style that triumphs.”
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