Lester Bangs
Lester Bangs
Leslie Conway "Lester" Bangswas an American music journalist, critic, author, and musician. He wrote for Creem and Rolling Stone magazines and was known for his leading influence in rock music criticism; Jim DeRogatis has called him "American's greatest rock critic"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth14 December 1948
CountryUnited States of America
real past sea
Personally I feel that real rock 'n' roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.
hate hero thinking
... the twin concepts of nihilism and the antihero have had it. What began with The Wild One and James "nobody understands me" Dean, ran with increasing vehement negativism up through the Stones and Velvets and Iggy ... [I]t may be time, in spite of all indications to the contrary from the exterior society, to begin thinking in terms of heroes again, of love instead of hate, of energy instead of violence, of strength instead of cruelty, of action instead of reaction.
understanding may reign
Sexual chaos reigns currently, but out of chaos may flow true understanding and harmony, and either way Elvis almost singlehandedly opened the floodgates.
always-believe left
I've always believed the New Left is rank.
book arbitrary falsification
All the proliferating falsifications of what I and everyone I know experienced once in what it is now so convenient to call the "fifties" or "sixties," as if life was really measured or lived in arbitrary decades, when the history books are sold like comix.
hate playing-jazz stanley
I hate Stanley Clark, but I have to admit he's playing Jazz whether I like it or not.
popular-music particular
I don't see that there are any particular changes in popular music.
business men organization
Corporations are social organizations, the theater in which men and women realize or fail to realize purposeful and productive lives.
guarantees agree one-thing
I can guarantee you one thing, we will never agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis.
accept almost america american-critic best book demands reader record writer
What this book demands from a reader is a willingness to accept that the best writer in America could write almost nothing but record reviews.
american-critic anymore country myth obviously
No I don't think it was a myth at all, anymore than what the recession that the whole country was experiencing was a myth, which obviously seems like it's going to get worse and worse.
american-critic general mean people reflects running society
Most of them are pretty down records, pretty unhappy, pretty confused. Which only reflects how people in general were feeling, I mean really the sense that you get is society running down.
american-critic basically maybe moral original recreate
And doing so you can recreate yourself and you can also come up with something that is not only original and creative and artistic, but also maybe even decent, or moral if I can use words like that, or something that's like basically good.
american-critic boring everywhere horrible mass ugly
Here we are in the 70's when everything really is horrible and it really stinks. The mass media, everything on television everything everywhere is just rotten. You know it's just really boring and really evil, ugly and worse.