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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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Lester Bangs
Age: 33 †
Born: 1948
Born: December 13
Died: 1982
Died: April 30
Journalist
Music Critic
Musician
Writer
Escondido
California
Rocks
Anybody
Democracy
Action
Art
Populist
True
Roll
Form
Rock
Ultimate

More quotes by 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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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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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
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I've always believed the New Left is rank.
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.
Lester Bangs
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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.
Lester Bangs
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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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Sometimes I think nothing is simple but the feeling of pain.
Lester Bangs
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The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.
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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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I hate Stanley Clark, but I have to admit he's playing Jazz whether I like it or not.
Lester Bangs
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Style is originality fashion is fascism. The two are eternally and unalterably opposed.
Lester Bangs