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
answers clash great-things
The great thing about The Clash of course is that they keep searching for answers beyond that.
children mean kids
I mean the interesting thing I think would be if something happened like, what happened in England where all these kids that all of a sudden can't afford the ticket prices.
teenager thinking uprising
That's one reason why it's pretty worthless, I can't totally buy it, if you think about it, it's things like the Phil Spector records. On one level they were rebellion, on another level they were keeping the teenager in his place.
boys people parent
A young woman is dead. I don’t care. You probably don’t care. The police don’t care. The papers don’t care. The punks for the most part don’t care. The only people that care are (I suppose) her parents and (I’m almost certain) the boy accused of murdering her.
attitude writing rocks
Rock 'n' roll is an attitude, it's not a musical form of a strict sort. It's a way of doing things, of approaching things. Writing can be rock 'n' roll, or a movie can be rock 'n' roll. It's a way of living your life.
hands violent schizophrenic
I'm really schizophrenic about that, because on the one hand I would say, yes there is, there's something inherently, even violent about it, it's wild and raw and all this.
sex humans
All humans are the same sex, except albinos.
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.
grateful way cages
John Lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once you've made your mark on history those who can't will be so grateful they'll turn it into a cage for you.
hate playing-jazz stanley
I hate Stanley Clark, but I have to admit he's playing Jazz whether I like it or not.