"I Wanna Be Sedated" is a song by American punk rock band Ramones, originally released on the band's fourth studio album, Road to Ruin (1978), in September 1978 and as the B-side of the UK single "She's the One" released on September 21, 1978.[2] The song was later released as a single in the Netherlands in 1979,[3] and in the U.S. in 1980 by RSO Records from the Times Square soundtrack album. It has since remained one of the band's best known songs.[4][5]
History
"I Wanna Be Sedated" was written by Joey Ramone.[6] In an interview about the song, Joey explains the chorus:
It's a road song. I wrote it in 1977, through to 78'. Well, Danny Fields was our first manager and he would work us to death. We would be on the road 360 days a year, and we went over to England, and we were there at Christmas time, and in Christmas time, London shuts down. There's nothing to do, nowhere to go. Here we were in London for the first time in our lives, and me and Dee Dee Ramone were sharing a room in the hotel, and we were watching The Guns of Navarone. So there was nothing to do, I mean, here we are in London finally, and this is what we are doing, watching American movies in the hotel room.
Music video
The music video for the song, directed by Bill Fishman, was released in September 1988,[7] about ten years after the song was originally released, to promote the compilation album Ramones Mania. The iconic video features the Ramones sitting at a table (left to right: Johnny, Joey, Marky and Dee Dee), nonchalantly reading and eating generic corn flakes (branded "Corn Flakes") while the background hallway erupts into a venue for nuns, acrobats, ballerinas, superheroes, monsters, cheerleaders, clowns, doctors, fetish nurses, and smoking schoolgirls. The film is intentionally sped up to show the excitement of the background, while the band's actions are in regular motion. This was achieved by having the band members move very slowly, while the crowd moved normally, and then speeding up the film. (Furthermore, one of the video's characters, the bride, [8] is a young Courtney Love.)[9]
A still from the video was featured in the liner notes of the band's 1989 album Brain Drain, though the song itself does not appear on that album.
In 1999, National Public Radio included the song in the "NPR 100", in which NPR's music editors sought to compile the one hundred most important American musical works of the 20th century.
Kelefa Sanneh said of the song, "I loved it because it seemed like the beginning of a tradition, pointing away from all the conventional thing a rock 'n' roll band might do, and pointing toward anything and everything else."[11]
According to Alice Cooper, Joey Ramone acknowledged the similarity to Cooper's earlier 1972 song "Elected," explaining that the Ramones listened to a lot of Alice Cooper.[12]
In popular culture
A shortened version of "I Wanna Be Sedated", arranged for strings by Benjamin Wallfisch and performed by Mirel Wagner, appears as the last track on the soundtrack album for the 2016 film A Cure for Wellness, composed by Wallfisch.[13] The was featured in the film's first trailer released in October 2016, but doesn't actually appear in the film itself.[14]
The song was featured in the penultimate episode of The Magicians, which aired on 25 March, 2020, sung by most of the cast during a heist operation in a musical episode.[16]
At 12:00 am on December 31, 2020, an internet meme began trending on social media that said it was "2020, 24 hours to go". This was a reference to the song's opening lyric, "twenty, twenty, twenty-four hours to go."[17]
‡ Sales+streaming figures based on certification alone.
References
^Molanphy, Chris (October 14, 2023). "This Ain't No Party?! Edition". Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia (Podcast). Slate. Retrieved November 10, 2023.
