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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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Lester Bangs
Age: 33 †
Born: 1948
Born: December 13
Died: 1982
Died: April 30
Journalist
Music Critic
Musician
Writer
Escondido
California
Coming
Strong
Find
Identities
Real
Personalities
Thing
Distinct
Really
Identity
Personality
Groups

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The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.
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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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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.
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All blues singers are great liars.
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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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I don't see that there are any particular changes in popular music.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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I've always believed the New Left is rank.
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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Sometimes I think nothing is simple but the feeling of pain.
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