Wit & Attitude Quote by Dee Dee Ramone

Dee Dee Ramone calling Metallica "so demonic" isn’t a moral panic; it’s a punk’s shorthand for awe. Coming from someone who helped codify fast, stripped-down irreverence, the line reads less like condemnation and more like admiration for a band that made heaviness feel almost supernatural in its precision. "Demonic" here is a compliment that acknowledges power beyond the ordinary: the sense that the riffs arrive like possession, that the machine is too tight to be merely human.

The second half - "they're crazy, I don't know how they do it" - is where the reverence lands. Dee Dee wasn’t naive about how music gets made; he’s marveling at a different kind of discipline. Punk mythology prizes immediacy, a kind of beautiful mess held together by attitude. Metallica, especially in the era that cemented their reputation, projected the opposite: velocity plus control, aggression plus architecture. Dee Dee’s bafflement is the tell. It’s the sound of one scene recognizing another scene’s superpower.

Context matters: late-80s/early-90s rock culture was busy sorting tribes (punk vs. metal, authenticity vs. commercial scale), and Metallica were becoming a mass phenomenon without losing their menace. Dee Dee’s quote sidesteps gatekeeping. He doesn’t argue about credibility; he reports a visceral effect. The intent is to register intensity, and the subtext is cross-genre respect: when the music hits hard enough, the categories stop mattering.