Released in November 1977, just a little more than a year after their debut album, the Ramones' Rocket To Russia is a testament to the very thing art is not supposed to do: stay the same. In fact, their persona, let alone their first three albums, suggests practically zero progress at all - and that's the point. Zero. Nothing. Rinse and repeat, at best. Even with producers whose sonic vision varied greatly, their albums churn the same cauldron of loud and fast with perfectly sequenced "slow" songs that make the fast ones seem even faster.

The album landed right at the dawn of these debates about what punk was or wasn't. Those disputes raged not only in the corporate label and promotional worlds eager to monetize the trend, but also between fans themselves, even to this day, about authenticity.