Lester Bangs was a fucking idiot with zero taste in music.

But perhaps I am peonic, after all, many people seem not to have the personality or talent (it's an asset!!) to pull off 'gonzo'.

If he is gonzo, of course.

I would not fuck him. In a very real sense, he is Yours.

I'm afraid you'll have to tell us why he sucks, Aaron.

As a writer I probably need a ten-year moratorium on reading any of his work, so that I can rediscover it and see why people were drawn to it.

But as a nerdy teenager in the '70s, his NME three-parter on the Clash was writing I looked up to with great awe. And his requiem for Peter Laughner and the piece on Astral Weeks are two of the most moving pieces of music writing I've read by anyone anywhere.

xxxpost

i still think 90% of 'psychotic reactions...' makes for great reading whether you're familiar with the subjects or not... i certainly wasn't, first time i read it, and i enjoyed as much if not more than the last (umpteenth) time i read it, when i mostly was.

and the 'gonzo' thing is great on pieces like the early stooges stuff, the playing-saxophone-at-the-landlady thing (still my favourite piece), the -b-movies-on-tv piece, etc - but i actually prefer the gentler, more complex, more reflective stuff, like the 'racism in punk' piece, or the laughner piece, or the miles davis piece in the second (and much inferior) collection. the biog is a big piece of shit from a big piece of shit who's totally jealous he could never write like lester, trying to make a grand tragedy out of a guy who just never quite sorted his life out, like the majority of his subjects and, i dare say, the majority of his readership. but give me the softer lester of the late 70s over pretty much everyone writing today.

His taste? Well, he listened to a lot of stuff and seemed to like much of it, and that's enough "taste" for a rock critic, seems to me. My taste has certainly changed, I've become far less doctrinaire than I used to be; ten years ago I wouldn't have been caught dead listening to Yes or Jean-Luc Ponty or Zappa, now I go, well, that has its merits, I enjoy it, and I still got my sense of humor about ultimate importance. I'd still rather listen to Jerry Butler sing "Hey, Western Union Man" than Yes do "Heart of the Sunrise," but what this says about the state of the world, I have no idea.

that's not really an argument, now is it? you can dislike someone's output, even if you don't have his/her talent. that said, i don't think i can ever trust mr zanders because obv he's a bit of an idiot. ;-) i ab-so-lu-te-ly revere/adore/admire lester bangs but i still like richard m better. there used to be a time i wanted to emulate both (oh the shame!), esp lester b. as marcello said, his pieces on aw and pl are ace.

he liked stevie nicks and no wave, how can you say he has bad taste in music! ;-)

Ha ha, me neither.

You're OTM, edd, until this sentence (if I'm misreadin' you, please holla). I reread Kael all the time, as I reread any of my favorite artists, even if I'm no way in love with "Nashville" or Louis Malle. Same with Bangs. Not only did they write persuasive, thoughtful prose, but these two make me laugh out loud. All the time.

(xpost)

He called Curtis Mayfield "nigger music". He can rot in hell for all I care.

context crucial here.

i liked that interview with Kraftwerk he did that somebody linked to on ILM once.

And what was the context? Was he drafting a parody of Elvis Costello?

I don't really care about Bangs' work, but I totally hate the way his influence has manifested itself in some of the most hackish, obnoxious music criticism currently going.

That, plus a ticket to a T-Dream concert.

I totally hate the way his influence has manifested itself in some of the most hackish, obnoxious music criticism currently going.

Hey, that sounds just like the influence Lou and Iggy had on music.

You're OTM, edd, until this sentence (if I'm misreadin' you, please holla). I reread Kael all the time, as I reread any of my favorite artists, even if I'm no way in love with "Nashville" or Louis Malle. Same with Bangs. Not only did they write persuasive, thoughtful prose, but these two make me laugh out loud. All the time. "

I re-read Kael, just to find out about a movie I might've missed, and she's entertaining. She's over the top, just like Bangs. They do make me laugh. I guess what I meant was that I, when I first read them, took it the wrong way, probably--I don't regard their stuff, now, as any kind of totally reliable guide to anything. And sure, you could say the same about any critic, but the terrain they explored was fairly new, no one really had the guts to say that the Troggs were as "important" as the Yardbirds or whoever, just like Kael was so strenuous in her championing of, say, "Nashville" (a great movie, but also a drag) or late Peckinpah. The bigger point seems to be that they were getting their licks in on some kind of critical establishment, they were pioneers. But that viewpoint seems to leave out a lot of stuff, you know, just like Tosches and his insistence on "no theory" and so forth. When you start championing the ephemeral, the half-realized or the gleefully barbaric, that's sure necessary, but I stop way short of saying that's all there is, even in rock and roll, and basically always have. But they were sure persuasive, and engaging, and of course, dangerous in that respect, and all you can do when someone toes that party line is to hope that one day they'll see all the great stuff that doesn't conform to it. I feel the same way about Christgau, sometimes--like why doesn't he get Latin music, why on earth would a 60-year-old still worry about the Clash or the New York Dolls, as fine as their music was. Too bad Lester Bangs died before he could articulate that, and I think he was obviously heading in that direction.

no offense dude, but i am SO VERY SICK of this line of bullshit.
you know, a lot of people have never read lester bangs and never will. that said, just cause somebody writes like somebody else, doesn't mean anything. for some reason, anybody with a remotely wild voice must be a lester bangs inspired hack. it's as if there's three paths one must take... either you're a stiff academic, an ad copy repeater box, or a lester bangs wannabe. i would wager that most of us out there wouldn't want any of those three pinned to our work. i just think that the body of writerly influence is much, much bigger than rock writing. pinning poor lester with the sins of The Fan Dude is just either a) just unfair or b) giving him too much credit.
m.

OH SNAP

Yeah, I really don't know if I buy this, Anthony. This is the Meltzer line on Bangs and to me it sounds more like Meltzer condescendingly saying, "Oh, stupid Lester couldn't give up on that rock and roll garbage." Lester was a music critic; that was his job. And he was freaking passionate about it -- good for him! He was one of the greats! He had personal problems, but being passionate about music was not one of them.

Maybe so, but that's not at all the kind of "spark" that I would want. I conciously approach music criticism in a way that rejects a lot of what I find useless and distasteful in post-Bangs music writing (or more specifically, in old zine writing and pre-Plagenhoef Pitchfork). I have little interest in whining about music that I don't enjoy. That's a total waste of my time and it's helpful to no one. My main interest is in shining a light on obscure tracks and putting them in a critical context that could get people interested in listening to the music. It's entirely evangelical in nature and I have no illusions about that. I don't give a fuck about hacks trying to make talking about music into some kind of bastard art form. I just want to be helpful. I don't get that sense from Bangs and his imitators at all - they are more selfinvolved and seem to have a contempt for the casual reader that I could never have.

I don't think Bangs ever did that.

My main interest is in shining a light on obscure tracks and putting them in a critical context that could get people interested in listening to the music. It's entirely evangelical in nature and I have no illusions about that.

That describes Lester Bangs perfectly. It's pretty much all he ever did.

they are more selfinvolved and seem to have a contempt for the casual reader that I could never have.

I don't feel any contempt from Bangs' writing. He always seemed pretty populist to me.

http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/user_images/pics/1/4931000/ngbbs42647bf49168c.jpg

haha I'd put Meltzer in the same bin as Bangs in the same "music died when I turned 25" bin, actually! It's not about being passionate about music, its craving the type of thrill you got when you were young and wide-eyed and idealistic. Not realizing that it wasn't necessarily the music qua music that made you so emotional as a kid.

I don't see how you can separate the two. It seems like most of the people who like Bangs would share his taste and worldview to some degree.

Blogs do the same thing. Except Bangs offered consistently interesting prose.

Where do you see this in Lester's writings?

This thread sort of dovetails with that discussion:
"[Music writing] attracts people whose primary interest in it isn't necessarily in the 'writing' part"
and there was another one about whether writers would rather be known as great writers with bad taste or bad writers with great taste but the search function is down right now so I can't find it.

Personally I don't think music writing is enough of an artform that I could enjoy writing for it's own sake. I read music writing that aligns with my tastes in some way. But I suppose I can see how professional writers have a broader interest in the craft itself.

Well, there are certainly some posters whose tastes I think align with mine, but have a reverence for certain writers (and posters) who I have critically dismissed for having either bad taste or even incompatible worldviews.

It seems like this becomes very difficult to define. Does Bangs have bad taste if he is in love with one or two artists that you think are shit? Does somebody who loves Bangs have a sense of taste that is narrowly defined by what Bangs liked or are they interested in other seemingly incongruous areas as well?

re: contempt re: Armed Forces, "sounded like some limey gettin' a F in Bruce Springsteen class and throwing a wildly inflated snit about it, sounding like Springsteen sounding like a real bad but slicked-up imitation of the Band, with maybe some Gary Lewis and the Playboys thrown in, pee-yew, which reaction I also had to the likes of Graham Parker, poor bleeder."

And he totally had reactionary tendencies. Think how many bands he later loved he dismissed outright the first time he heard them: MC5, Exile, Talking Heads, dude was bawling that the Rolling Stones had fucking sold out the fuckers outside a show in like 1965.

I think that's a good quality actually. He wasn't afraid to admit he was wrong, and the writing was better for it.

And Lester totally OTM when he says things like:

"Preferring Hank Williams or Charlie Parker or The Sun Sessions or the Velvet Underground to Squeeze and Rickie Lee Jones and the Go-Gos and the Psychedelic Furs is not nostalgia, it's good taste."

Oh, I don't actually know. I was just wondering out loud. I'm in the "only read Psych Reaction.." camp but I thought I had heard that he cranked out a lot of quick and dirty reviews of pretty forgettable bands in his Creem days. I'm not saying that as a criticism: that kind of writing would have come with the territory. I just wonder if it's better to experience the full Lester or a few selected works and how that effects people's opinion of his worth as a writer.

You can get a sense of his whole oeuvre by looking at the list of writings in the back of Let It Blurt.

Hahahaha! That's funny.

But Bangs died with the Human League's Dare on his turntable. I've always thought he'd be mortified by that if he could see his own death.

Again, what's wrong with being a rock critic? Did he not write great pieces in the last couple of years of his life on current stuff? Would astrophysics or brain surgery have been good things for him to try instead?

The excerpts from All My Friends Are Hermits in both books are horrible. (Though the Drug Punk excerpts in the new book are good.)

Lester was a tragic tale because he died of drugs.

x-post to ellison: cuz he seemed kinda miserable?

x-post to blount: eep! i'm sure it makes a fun ringtone, though.

That's one of the best truisms I've ever read.

By the way, it's not like I champion a writer's right to be feckless. I have a rather vague belief that part of being a moral writer (and person, ahem) is to stand by one's statements - which also means acknowledging when you're wrong.

I automatically put anything gonzo in the MAN category; maybe it might be better to say patriarchal than macho.

Also: Patti Smith was more gonzo than Lester.

I kind of agree with Spencer about the masculinity of this kind of “gonzo” writing, though I suppose the background of that is sort of another thread. (NB I hate the use of that term with Bangs, because the proper gonzoid elements of his work—i.e., the writer as a persona in the text—aren’t actually the bits of Bangs’s work that makes it so distinctive. They are, however, what puts him in that category of not-so-great writers beloved of the type of boys who think of “being a writer” as being about a persona and a role more than, you know, actually writing well.) I want to say more but I'm still trying to tease out some of the complicating factors here, like the fact that music has always been tied up in social identity, and the flipside of that is that discourse about music has always been unfortunately tied up in certain macho hierarchies about social identity, something critics still haven't gotten over.

Spencer, of his later New York stuff I really do recommend “The White Noise Supremacists,” which is about racism in the turn-of-80s downtown post-punk scene; it’s there that he most explicitly and visibly grapples with something in a considered way, and calls himself out on stuff in his own early writing that he considered funny or “rock and roll,” and at some point seems to be coming to that conclusion that I always congratulate J Darnielle about—like, wait, you know what, attitude and style are one thing but in the end there are actual moral issues in the world, and things to believe in whether they’re presently cool or not.

That Meltzer would ream him for moving in this direction would seem to indicate that Meltzer is an idiot or an asshole or both: the guy stopped scrawling happily and actually started thinking stuff through and taking human stands on things. I know there are old people who still get some transgressive thrill out of watching people just rant and be wrong about everything, but this is the twenty-first century; I'll take later-Bangs anyday.

Bangs-as-macho, offhand: that idiotic story about running after his landlady with the saxophone?

As for Bangs, in the pieces mentioned here, it's just the style of writing. You really can't see it at all? Throwing around expletives, ranting, the self-conscious "cool" factor. I'm not even saying it's bad.

So often totally overstated when it comes to summarizing Lester's writing. You're talking more about some stereotype than you're talking about Lester, frankly. And I don't really see him as much of a macho guy at all, really. Was he more macho than Christgau or some other dude who had less passion than he did? You'd have to

"structural machismo" or "hubris" ?

There are some horrible pieces in the Mainlines book, but if by "dreck" someone means "quick and dirty reviews that he cranked out" I have to wonder. Not saying that he NEVER did this, but the guy was very devoted to WRITING.

This goes back to the writing vs. taste divide because when I mentioned "dreck" I wasn't thinking of bad writing per se. I was thinking more of the reality of a guy who listened to hundreds of records a week for many years and surely must have praised some pretty shitty albums at one point or another.

And once again, I wasn't criticizing Bangs (whose writing I love) but trying to form a theory as to why some people hate him so deeply. My assumption about people who have read a lot vs. a little Bangs seems to have been backwards. Now I get the feeling that those who have a deeper familiarity with his work tend to admire him pretty deeply. Others seem read one or two pieces and out of some irrational hatred for something like Astral Weeks decide that Bangs is a good icon to knock down.

http://www.handsomeproductions.com/lesterbangs.htm

he was just a good writer, who could engage with music and be funny when you come down to it, and when he toned down the shtick because he realized it was a dead end he did not only the white noise supremacists, but also things like the clash tour piece and etc. etc.

meltzer was waaay more gonzo (and beat for that matter) (and he makes a big deal that he was/is) (and he pulls it off in a way that's not horribly macho, sometimes) (and tosches is all macho and he pulls that off too! go figure!)

But again, I don't see that as a fair assessment of Lester's body of work.

When I said that Lester was passionate, I meant that you can feel palpable passion for the music that he loves. I wasn't referring to him ranting or whatever. You make it seem like all he did in his earlier writing was rant and spiel. I don't think this is true at all! I see the majority of his writing from early on as fairly calculated and considered.

Oh, and Herbie Hancock did great shit - "Future Shock" was nowhere near an artistic high point for the guy, although it probably was the apex of his DJ's career.

--a secondhand review
--of a DeRo tome

but I have no idea in which context such a remark would be anything less than kinda dumb. Unless maybe he retracted it or something.

But Lester wrote lovely English.

As for the cooler-than-thou idea, I just don't see it. Bangs was explosively opinionated, but more in the "Fuck you, your favorite band sucks" way than the pedantic "I know more about music than you, so sit down and pay attention" way that a lot of prior criticism almost took for granted. As for the macho/patriarchal thing, anyone that so painfully fawns over an artist (Lou Reed) that obviously finds them to be below contempt, and commits the experience to text, shows a great deal of vulnerability, IMHO.

Ahh, how sweet and thoughtful of you.

[that was a quote...sorry.]

All the asides to 'Lester Bangs wannabes' just seems to reflect more on the lack of comprehension over what it was that he was good at. If you don't get Bangs, then you think his fame came about just because he shot his mouth off a lot, hung out with a lot of bands & acted like a jerk. Truth is, to me, that it was all of that plus an ability to be completely honest, to stand completely as an island, and channel that conviction into his writing so well that he could have been standing there shouting it at you. He had an innate ability to put himself on paper, and the value of that ability, the rarity of it, tends to be sorely underestimated.

gnight...

I *have* always seen Chuck as a Bangs descendent, both in the sense of cockeyed passion (I-want-my-own-'There's-a-Riot-Goin'-On') and in their respective acceptances of bubblegum, nerf metal and other supposed crap as glorious noise. Come to think of it, Bangs' assertion that the Banana Splits theme tune would remain "in my head unto the grave" isn't far wrong, given the fact of 'Dare!' on his turntable on April 30, 1982.

Lester Bangs, Pauline Kael and Tom Wolfe were the holy trinity for me as a teenager in the 70s. Inspired and inspiring, reading their electric prose and absorbing their obsessive engagement w/popular culture made me want to be a writer. But I think a lot of journalism is tied to its time and context, so when I read my onetime idols now (not very often) they feel like anachronisms: startling limitations and misjudgements leap out of their still-scintillating sentences.

I believe Bangs was reacting to what he saw and heard around him, his alternative canon-building (VU Stooges Eno)kinda happened by accident. But make no mistake: he may be the only cultural critic of the 20th century who ideas/theories/opinions sparked an enduring mass artistic movement -- punk. I wasn't an English major but I don't THINK Edmund Wilson inspired a school of popular novelists.

topics for futher debate:

influences of New Journalism VS the Beats in the Bangs approach.

the Lester Counter-factual: had he lived would he be a)a windy neo-conservative "humanist" novel-writer (a la Wolfe) b)a despotic music editor who manipulates a string of Lesterette followers (a la Kael).

Defend the Indefensible: AIR SUPPLY

is that really true m and if so how did it work? Instead I get the pic that he wz one of the few that embraced punk straight away once it happened, by not only giving his seal of approval but also writing convincingly about it -- it never ever looked like a form of contrarianism. He ended up doing a v similar job to other "cultural critics" like adorno (12-tone) and greenberg (abstract expressionism)?

also i'd say whomever mentioned capote upthread is right, i think he and norman mailer probably have to answer for "gonzo," if anyone does, heh.

How many English punks knew of Situationism? I guess McLaren did?

anyway, scott woods asks me the bangs-or-xgau question here, fwiw:

http://www.rockcritics.com/popped/talkeddy/eddy2.html

We need 'em both. (As he groans under the weight of his record shelves.)

I always assumed it also described (not exclusively) the prose style too?

nabiscothingy articulated the underlying point in my last post for me, yay.

?
m.

Julio I'd say Bangs anticipated and shaped the punk movement when he championed the Count 5 over James Taylor, proselytized for Lou Reed and Iggy when few cared, lent an ear to teenage faves like Black Sabbath and Grand Funk Railroad. So he didn't invent punk, but he articulated the general sensibility -- and many of the musical specifics -- and put them in print several years before 1977.

yeah, gonzo as subset of nj is totally correct. i'd tend (if i was a big categorizin' type) to put bangs and didion in nj and meltzer and hst in gonzo.

I agree. In college I actually made up my own essay topic that very thing. A whole lot more fun than the assigned questions they were offering! Even now it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch to link the two, I don't think. Omitting Lester from the NJ anthology strikes me now as a little odd, perhaps deliberate? Maybe he was more in the gonzo camp. In fact, right now, I'm thinking gonzo. He's too loose to be NJ.
Shrug. Babbling...

idos/tg/detail/-/140003356X/qid=1115514391/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/104-0411839-2955117?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

I haven't read it but judging from the blurbs it sounds more like a survey of the status quo than a report from the cutting edge.

The New New Journalism : Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert Boynton

So I guess it's actually not an anthology but a book of interviews.

Did you know 'The New Journalism' is out of print? That kind of bums me out. I mean, heck, I don't even know if there's a ton of people out there who read it, let alone cared about it for very long, but it was a fun book, I thought.

Heh. Bound. Geddit?

y'all stop for a minute and respect this for perhaps the most wise thing I've ever read here. also a perfect epitaph for my lurking.
goodbye ILM.

-- Aaron Hertz (aaronh...), January 24th, 2005.

it's gonna be "George Bush Sucks" on the actual CD, OF COURSE.

if i liked coltrane more i'd say the coltrane of writing: so i'll say an IDEA of the coltrane of writing, and there lies the good of it and there the problems also