"The point is that, like Richard Hell says, rock n roll is an arena in which you recreate yourself, and all this blathering about authenticity is just a bunch of crap. The Clash are authentic because their music carries such brutal conviction, not because theyre Noble Savages."
Leslie Conway "Lester" Bangs was an American music journalist and critic. He wrote for Creem and Rolling Stone magazines and was also a performing musician. The music critic Jim DeRogatis called him "America's greatest rock critic".
"I was in high school (oh, I told you — that was kind of where they put you when they didnt know what to do with you — when you were too big for the Kiddie Kokoons and too young to go out an hafta assume what we used to call Manhood, which involved going at the same time every day to some weird building and doing some totally useless shit for hours on end just so you could get some bread and have everybody respect you)."
Lester Bangs"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."
Lester Bangs"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."
Lester Bangs"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."
Lester Bangs"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."
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."
Lester Bangs"I should say that when people talk about capitalism its a bit of a joke. Theres no such thing. No country, no business class, has ever been willing to subject itself to the free market, free market discipline. Free markets are for others. Like, the Third World is the Third World because they had free markets rammed down their throat. Meanwhile, the enlightened states, England, the United States, others, resorted to massive state intervention to protect private power, and still do. Thats right up to the present. I mean, the Reagan administration for example was the most protectionist in post-war American history. Virtually the entire dynamic economy in the United States is based crucially on state initiative and intervention: computers, the internet, telecommunication, automation, pharmaceutical, you just name it. Run through it, and you find massive ripoffs of the public, meaning, a system in which under one guise or another the public pays the costs and takes the risks, and profit is privatized. Thats very remote from a free market. Free market is like what India had to suffer for a couple hundred years, and most of the rest of the Third World."
"He, who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge"I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought."
Erich Fromm"You cant manage yourself, Root. How do you expect to manage others?"
"Do not try to make the brilliant pupil a replica of yourself."
"I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested."