What the song is about
The subject is the crowd, which is unusual. Rock songs are generally sung from the stage about the singer; this one is a description of the people in front of it. They form a line, they pile into the back, they lose their minds, they go.
Tommy Ramone was explicit about the intent — it depicts young people arriving at a show — and the song is written from a slight distance, watching rather than participating. There is no narrator with feelings, no story, no object of desire. It is a two-minute description of an audience becoming a mass.
Which is why it works as well as it does in the only place most people now hear it, which is a sports arena. The song was already about a crowd doing something in unison. Being adopted by actual crowds doing something in unison did not require a reinterpretation.
Where "Hey ho, let's go" came from
The four most famous syllables in punk have a mundane and well-documented origin, and it is not a punk one.
Tommy Ramone has said the chant structure was modelled on the Bay City Rollers' "Saturday Night" — a 1973 record by a Scottish teen-pop band, and about as far from the Bowery as it is possible to get. He wanted that kind of shouted, spelled-out hook.
The phrase itself he traced to Rufus Thomas's "Walking the Dog", by way of the Rolling Stones' cover, where the band thought Mick Jagger's delivery of "high, low, tipsy toe" sounded like "hey ho". He has also said the chant came to him while walking home from the grocery store carrying a bag of shopping.
So the defining moment of American punk is a Scottish bubblegum arrangement wrapped around a misheard Memphis R&B lyric, thought up on the way back from the shops. The Ramones' whole method is in that sentence: pop songwriting technique, applied at volume with everything decorative removed.
The word "blitzkrieg"
Blitzkrieg means lightning war — the German tactic of overwhelming speed. The song was called "Animal Hop" until Dee Dee Ramone supplied the title, and it is best understood as a description of tempo and impact rather than a statement about anything.
Dee Dee also made the change that has caused the most trouble, altering "shouting in the back now" to "shoot 'em in the back now". That single word is why the song still gets read as violent, and it is a fair thing for a listener to notice. What it is not is a considered political position; the Ramones' relationship with this kind of imagery was consistently one of provocation without content, which is a criticism that can be made of them and has been.
The song's subject matter, unlike much of the band's early material, is deliberately vague. There is nothing underneath to decode.
How it came to be made
Recorded in January 1976 with Craig Leon producing, and released the following month as the opening track of Ramones, the band's debut on Sire. The album famously cost very little and was made very fast, and it sounds like it in the best sense.
The credit is collective, as all Ramones songs were, but Tommy wrote the music and most of the lyric, with Dee Dee contributing the title and the altered line.
It was not a hit. It did not chart. The certifications it now carries — Gold in the United States and several other markets — were accumulated over decades by a record that sold steadily forever rather than quickly once.
How it is put together
Two minutes and twelve seconds, three chords, one tempo, no solo, no bridge, no fade. The count-in is part of the record. Johnny Ramone's guitar is played in continuous downstrokes, which is physically punishing and is the reason for the flat, machine-like wall of sound — no upstroke means no lightness between beats.
The structure's genius is the chant. It arrives immediately, requires no musical ability, has no words to remember, and repeats. A song that opens with its own crowd participation instructions is a song designed to be joined by people who have never heard it.
Everything else is subtraction. There are no dynamics, no ornament and nothing held in reserve, and after two minutes it stops rather than resolving. The influence of this record is less about the notes than about the demonstration that a song could contain this little and still work.
The video
The official video is below, on the Ramones' channel.
The official upload on the Ramones' channel.
The lyrics
There are about forty words in the song, and half of them are the chant. What remains is a sequence of observations with no connective tissue: they are forming in a straight line, going through a tight wind, the kids are losing their minds.
The one line people argue about is the altered one:
"Shoot 'em in the back now"
Tommy's original — shouting in the back — described the crowd at the rear of a venue, which fits everything around it. Dee Dee's change introduces a violence the rest of the lyric does not support, and it has been the source of the song's occasional trouble ever since. Both versions of the line are documented, which makes this one of the rare cases where you can see exactly where a song's edge was inserted, and by whom.
The rest is pure momentum. Nothing is described in any detail, nobody is named, and the song ends where it began, with everyone shouting the same four syllables. Fifty years on, that chant is heard in stadiums by millions of people who could not name the band — which is either the most complete success a two-minute song can have, or the final proof that there was never anything inside it but the noise.