Too Tough to Die

The Ramones’ Too Tough To Die is often positioned as a return to form for the band, but today, forty years since its release, their eighth studio album seems worthy of a far more radical categorization. In the musical landscape of the mid-1980s, the album was incoherent — not in a pejorative sense, but in how it reflected the paradoxes of its time. Made without a steady compass, the album’s incongruity became its center, and it holds. As Joey Ramone said in a 1988 interview: “Around ’84, the world was changing drastically with Iran and Gadaffi and all this stuff. Things were getting scary. So, our songs started changing.”