Ramones / Subterranean Jungle / 1983
Time Has Come Today
restless, anxious, defiantly resigned
This is the Ramones' cover of the Chambers Brothers' 1967 psychedelic-soul classic, stripped down and sped up into a two-minute punk blast. The original's hypnotic, extended jam becomes a compact statement of urgency and dislocation, with the band's blunt delivery flattening the psychedelic imagery into something closer to punk fatalism.
generational urgency displacement/homelessness loss of love fatalism transformation through crisis
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addressing an unspecified audience or generation, insisting on immediacy while describing personal collapse; the voice is sincere rather than ironic, though the band's delivery adds a layer of detachment to the original's earnestness.
What happens
The song opens with a generational declaration that action can't be delayed, then pivots to a specific personal crisis: the speaker has lost their home, their lover, and their bearings, reduced to contemplating transit as escape. Amid this loss, a strange affirmation emerges — despite having nowhere to go and facing possible destruction, the speaker claims they'll still find pleasure, framing suffering as a psychedelic transformation of the soul. The song ends by looping back to its central assertion, repeating the title phrase until it becomes an incantation.
How it's built
Built on repetition rather than conventional verse-chorus development — the title phrase recurs like a mantra, anchoring looser, more discursive verses about loss and homelessness. The Ramones compress the original's long instrumental/vocal breakdown into tighter repetitions, and the bridge-like 'time, time, time' chant becomes a stark, driving hook rather than a psychedelic freakout.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song declares urgency in generational terms, positioning youth as an unstoppable force moving on its own timeline regardless of outside judgment. This works as a mission statement for the whole track's insistence on the present moment.'
Second verse
“I have no place to stay”
The scale suddenly narrows from generational statement to intimate crisis — the speaker is homeless, brokenhearted, and contemplating the subway as both escape route and metaphor for aimless movement. The repetition of having no home underscores destabilization.
Third verse / pre-chorus
“burned up by the sun”
Here the song embraces a cosmic, almost apocalyptic image of self-destruction, yet immediately asserts a determination to enjoy whatever time remains. The soul's described alteration suggests the speaker interprets their suffering as a kind of expansion or awakening rather than pure defeat.
Chant/bridge
The stripped-back repetition of the single word 'time' turns the song's central concept into a percussive, almost ritualistic chant, emphasizing the Ramones' punk instinct to reduce psychedelic sprawl into rhythmic insistence.
Closing repetitions
The final looping of the title phrase abandons narrative resolution entirely, leaving the listener with pure insistence rather than closure — appropriate for a song about the present tense refusing to wait.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated declaration that time has arrived functions as both structural glue and thematic insistence, pushing the song forward through sheer repetition rather than narrative development.
- catalog of loss
- The middle section lists displacement, romantic loss, and grief in quick succession, giving the sense of accumulating crisis without pausing for elaboration.
- neologism/coinage
- The invented term for the soul's altered state condenses drug culture and spiritual transformation into a single word, marking the song's psychedelic lineage even as the Ramones' treatment strips away the original's trippy production.
- paradox
- The claim of having fun despite facing annihilation by the sun creates a tension between doom and pleasure that runs through the song's fatalistic optimism.
Reading it
Read most straightforwardly, the song is about a personal crisis (loss of home and love) reframed as urgent, almost cosmic necessity — the speaker insists the moment demands action even as they've lost their footing. A broader reading, closer to the original's 1960s context, treats the song as a generational anthem about counterculture upheaval, with personal loss standing in for a larger societal rupture. The Ramones' version, stripped of psychedelic instrumentation, tends to foreground the personal-crisis reading, turning what was once expansive and searching into something clipped and urgent.
Context
The song originated with the Chambers Brothers in 1967 as an extended psychedelic-soul epic tied to countercultural upheaval; the Ramones covered it on Subterranean Jungle (1983), a period when the band was leaning into more melodic, covers-inclusive material. Their version compresses the original's nearly eleven-minute jam into a tight punk arrangement, changing the song's meaning by removing the instrumental space that let the original breathe into abstraction.
Listen for
- how the band compresses a sprawling psychedelic original into punk economy
- the way repetition of the title phrase functions as rhythmic device rather than lyrical development
- the tonal flattening of psychedelic imagery when delivered in blunt punk vocal style
- the contrast between generational declaration in the opening and intimate crisis in the middle verses
- the stripped-down 'time' chant as the song's rhythmic core
About Ramones
The Ramones were an American punk rock band formed in the New York City neighborhood Forest Hills, Queens, in 1974. Known for helping establish the punk movement in the United States and elsewhere, the Ramones are often recognized as one of the first bands of the genre.
1974 - 1996 / United States
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