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Sharing uninformed opinions with random strangers used to be an astonishingly work-intensive process. Instead, people expressed their inarticulate fury about Dookie's surprise success by using mimeograph machines or stolen Kinko's cards to painstakingly assemble "zines," which they distributed to mailing lists of like-minded jerks.

Green Day would have been the most hated band online in 1994, if Internet usage were widespread at the time. We are serious musicians and bold political thinkers. The just-released Idiot retread 21st Century Breakdown cynically combines Ramones-style album-to-album redundancy with another bombastic Yes-style "song cycle." But 2004's American Idiot revealed the group's traitorous plan: Establish a constituency based on pop-punk principles, then conspire to reestablish rock operas. Green Day played the Ramones' Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, and two of its members even named children after the band. Many fans touted Green Day as a successor to the increasingly deceased Ramones. It was the golden age of musical anarcho-primitivism, or, to use a simpler parlance befiting these revolutionary minimalist bands, party times for ugly dudes who didn't play guitar so good. Once-beloved vocal virtuosos such as Steve Perry and Dennis DeYoung fled into reclusive obscurity, like exiled intellectuals in Stalinist Russia. Yes guitarist Steve Howe hacked off his hands in tearful penance for discouraging a generation of unskilled players. The Ramones kept releasing slight variations on their stick-figure template until audiences became so inured to rudimentary punk that they'd toss any records that contained more than three chords into town-square bonfires. The Ramones also eliminated "reptilian appearance" from the list of commonly cited obstacles to "cool music scene" acceptance.

"I'll never be as good as those wizards from Yes," they'd whine after yet another failed attempt at replicating "Siberian Khatru." Then the Ramones released two crude albums in 1976, and suddenly oaf-fingered teens no longer viewed their inability to master (or hold without dropping) their instruments as a hindrance to public performance. In the '70s, young musicians despaired at the degree of proficiency required for entry-level rock stardom.