Quote

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

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
Better
Band
Fulfillment
Ever
Perhaps
Roll
Look
Since
Model
Looks
Asks
Seeking
Glimpsed
Kind
Society
Models
Mistaking
Something
Moment
Guess
Obsessively
Moments
Rock
Prophecy
Beautiful
Rocks
Bands

More quotes by Lester Bangs

Image
I hate Stanley Clark, but I have to admit he's playing Jazz whether I like it or not.
Lester Bangs
Image
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
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
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 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
Style is originality fashion is fascism. The two are eternally and unalterably opposed.
Lester Bangs
Image
The great thing about The Clash of course is that they keep searching for answers beyond that.
Lester Bangs
Image
All blues singers are great liars.
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
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
I don't see that there are any particular changes in popular music.
Lester Bangs
Image
I've always believed the New Left is rank.
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
Realizing that life is precious the natural tendency is to trample on it, like laughing at a funeral.
Lester Bangs
Image
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
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
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
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
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
Sometimes I think nothing is simple but the feeling of pain.
Lester Bangs