I was in high school (oh, I told you — that was kind of where they put — Lester Bangs

"By the end of the decade it had become obvious that perhaps the one constant of our variegated and strung-out peer groups was a pervasive sense of self-consciousness that sent us in grouchy packs to ugly festivals just to be together and dig ourselves and each other, as if all of this meant something greater than that we were kids who liked rock n roll and came out to have a good time, as if our very styles and trappings and drugs and jargon could be in themselves political statements for any longer than about fifteen stoned seconds, even a threat to the Mother Country! So we loved and loved and doted on ourselves and our reflections in each other even as the whole thing got out of hand and turned into mud and disaster areas and downs and death."

"The trend toward narcissistic flair has been responsible in large part for smiting rock with the superstar virus, which revolves around the substituting of attitudes and flamboyant trappings, into which the audience can project their fantasies, for the simple desire to make music, get loose, knock the folks out or get em up dancin. Its not enough just to do those things anymore; what you must do instead if you want success on any large scale is figure a way of getting yourself associated in the audiences mind with their pieties and their sense of "community," i.e., ram it home that youre one of THEM; or, alternately, deck and bake yourself into an image configuration so blatant or outrageous that you become a culture myth."

"The top rockers have a mythic aura about them, the "superstar," and thats a basically unhealthy state of things, in fact its the very virus thats fucking up rock, a subspecies of the virus I spoke of earlier that infests our culture from popstars to politics."

"John Lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once youve made your mark on history those who cant will be so grateful theyll turn it into a cage for you."

"The extravagant and ostentatious lifestyles that pass for charisma in a time when almost anybody talks about charisma but if you think about it theres precious little to be seen."

"O.K., Im a rock critic. I also write and record music. I write poetry, fiction, straight journalism, unstraight journalism, beatnik drivel, mortifying love letters, death threats to white jazz critics signed "The Mau Maus of East Harlem," and once a year my own obituary (latest entry: "He was promising...")."