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When kids can't afford to see it anymore maybe we'll have a whole resurgence of garage bands all over America and this New Wave thing will start to mean something on a grass roots level.

Lester Bangs

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Lester Bangs
Age: 33 †
Born: 1948
Born: December 13
Died: 1982
Died: April 30
Journalist
Music Critic
Musician
Writer
Escondido
California
Start
Grass
Kids
Wave
America
Anymore
Whole
Roots
Mean
Band
Resurgence
Thing
Level
Garage
Something
Levels
Bands
Maybe
Afford

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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.
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The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.
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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.
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. . . rock and roll, as I see it, is the ultimate populist art form, democracy in action, because it's true: anybody can do it.
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I don't see that there are any particular changes in popular music.
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I hate Stanley Clark, but I have to admit he's playing Jazz whether I like it or not.
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I've always believed the New Left is rank.
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Realizing that life is precious the natural tendency is to trample on it, like laughing at a funeral.
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Rock'n'roll is an attitude, it's not a musical form of a strict sort. It's 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.
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Rock is for everybody it should be so implicitly anti-elitist that the question of whether somebody's qualified to perform it should never even arise.
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The whole point of American culture is to pick up any old piece of trash and make it shine with more facets than the Hope Diamond.
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Style is originality fashion is fascism. The two are eternally and unalterably opposed.
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The extravagant and ostentatious lifestyles that pass for charisma in a time when almost anybody talks about charisma but if you think about it there's precious little to be seen.
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