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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

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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
Really
Schizophrenic
Would
Inherently
Wild
Violent
Hand
Hands
Even
Something

More quotes by Lester Bangs

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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.
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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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The great thing about The Clash of course is that they keep searching for answers beyond that.
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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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I don't see that there are any particular changes in popular music.
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The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.
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Style is originality fashion is fascism. The two are eternally and unalterably opposed.
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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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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.
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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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All blues singers are great liars.
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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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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
Lester Bangs
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Sometimes I think nothing is simple but the feeling of pain.
Lester Bangs
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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.
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I mean it's easier to be in a demonstration if it's a trip that's one of the reasons why the whole thing fell apart in 1971, because it wasn't a trip any longer.
Lester Bangs
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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