I Wanna Be Sedated

"I Wanna Be Sedated" was written by Joey Ramone.[4] In an interview about the song, Joey explains the chorus:

It's a road song. I wrote it in 1977, through the 78. Well, Danny Fields was our first manager and he would work us to death. We would be on the road 360 days a year, and we went over to England, and we were there at Christmas time, and in Christmas time, London shuts down. There's nothing to do, nowhere to go. Here we were in London for the first time in our lives, and me and Dee Dee Ramone were sharing a room in the hotel, and we were watching The Guns of Navarone. So there was nothing to do, I mean, here we are in London finally, and this is what we are doing, watching American movies in the hotel room.

The music video for the song, directed by Bill Fishman, was released in September 1988,[5] about ten years after the song was originally released, to promote the compilation album Ramones Mania. The iconic video features the Ramones sitting at a table (left to right: Johnny, Joey, Marky and Dee Dee), nonchalantly reading and eating generic corn flakes (branded "Corn Flakes") whilst the background hallway erupts into a venue for nuns, acrobats, ballerinas, monsters, cheerleaders, clowns, doctors, fetish nurses, and smoking schoolgirls. The film is intentionally sped up to show the excitement of the background, while the band's actions are in regular motion. This was achieved by having the band members move very slowly, while the crowd moved normally, and then speeding up the film. (Furthermore, one of the video's characters is a young Courtney Love).[6]

A still from the video was featured in the liner notes of the band’s 1989 album Brain Drain, though the song itself does not appear on that album.

"I Wanna Be Sedated" was number 145 on the Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.[7] Marky Ramone is the drummer on this track.

In 1999, National Public Radio included the song in the "NPR 100", in which NPR's music editors sought to compile the one hundred most important American musical works of the 20th century.

• The Adicts covered the song in the mid-80s when they were on Sire[8] although it wasn't released until the 1992 compilation Totally Adicted. It was later included as a bonus track on some versions of Sound of Music.
• Kirsty MacColl covered the song in Titanic Days.

• The song is performed by a cover-band (The Offspring) at a High School Halloween Ball in the 1999 comedy-horror movie Idle Hands.
• The song is featured in the 2015 film Terminator Genisys, where Sarah Connor listens to it in one scene in 1984, and later listens to it on a headset while she, Kyle Reese and the T-800 are arming themselves in an underground bunker. It was also mentioned in the novelization of Terminator 2: Judgment Day as one of the songs that John Connor listens to.
• Ramones Time: At 12:00 am on December 31, 2019, many people posted that it was, "2020, 24 hours to go."[9]
• The song was featured in the penultimate episode of The Magicians which aired on March 25, sung by most of the cast during a heist operation in a musical episode.[10]

• Lyrics of this song at MetroLyrics