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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.

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
Stupid
Place
Anything
Might
Goddam
Firsts
Block
First
Accomplish
Thing
Hero
General

More quotes by Lester Bangs

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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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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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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
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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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Realizing that life is precious the natural tendency is to trample on it, like laughing at a funeral.
Lester Bangs
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Style is originality fashion is fascism. The two are eternally and unalterably opposed.
Lester Bangs
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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.
Lester Bangs
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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.
Lester Bangs
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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.
Lester Bangs
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The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.
Lester Bangs
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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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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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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
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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
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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.
Lester Bangs
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I don't see that there are any particular changes in popular music.
Lester Bangs
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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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All blues singers are great liars.
Lester Bangs
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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
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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.
Lester Bangs