Quote

I hate Stanley Clark, but I have to admit he's playing Jazz whether I like it or not.

Lester Bangs

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lester Bangs
Age: 33 †
Born: 1948
Born: December 13
Died: 1982
Died: April 30
Journalist
Music Critic
Musician
Writer
Escondido
California
Playing
Whether
Hate
Like
Clark
Stanley
Admit
Jazz

More quotes by Lester Bangs

Image
. . . rock and roll, as I see it, is the ultimate populist art form, democracy in action, because it's true: anybody can do it.
Lester Bangs
Image
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.
Lester Bangs
Image
Don’t ask me why I obsessively look to rock ’n’ roll bands for some kind of model for a better society. I guess it’s just that I glimpsed something beautiful in a flashbulb moment once, and perhaps mistaking it for prophecy have been seeking its fulfillment ever since.
Lester Bangs
Image
A hero is a goddam stupid thing to have in the first place and a general block to anything you might wanta accomplish on your own.
Lester Bangs
Image
Style is originality fashion is fascism. The two are eternally and unalterably opposed.
Lester Bangs
Image
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.
Lester Bangs
Image
The thing is that, they all had real strong personalities and real distinct identities, and I don't find most of the groups that are coming out now really do.
Lester Bangs
Image
I don't see that there are any particular changes in popular music.
Lester Bangs
Image
Realizing that life is precious the natural tendency is to trample on it, like laughing at a funeral.
Lester Bangs
Image
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.
Lester Bangs
Image
The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.
Lester Bangs
Image
Or like in the early 70's when we had the reaction against acid rock and all the fuzz tone, and feedback, and the noise. And you had James Taylor and everyone went acoustic and that.
Lester Bangs
Image
I've always believed the New Left is rank.
Lester Bangs
Image
All blues singers are great liars.
Lester Bangs
Image
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.
Lester Bangs
Image
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.
Lester Bangs
Image
The real question is what to live for. And I can't answer it. Except another one of your records. And another chance for me to write. Art for art's sake, corny as that sounds.
Lester Bangs
Image
Basically no, I mean I think that it's very easy to like I say, smoke a joint or even to wear a Chairman Mao button, or do a lot of these things with out knowing what's behind it, and what it really means.
Lester Bangs
Image
As far as a truly radical conscience, you have to take it as part of a larger thing, that it was sort of historical inevitability that with the coming of a leaguer society people would start to use drugs a lot more then they had before.
Lester Bangs
Image
The only questions worth asking today are whether humans are going to have any emotions tomorrow, and what the quality of life will be if the answer is no.
Lester Bangs