Lester Bangs - Classic or Carburetor Dung?

th reason is this: "We are all shit but at 3am with a head full of bad speed, cheap dope and warm beer, Young Americans become the most sincere song ever written and The Day John Kennedy Died ring like a book in the New Testement. Lester Bangs changed my life and if you have an issue witth that then mount it on the hood ornament of a '71 Mustang Mach 1, put Jonathon Richman's "Roadrunner" on the 8 track, rev it up to the redline, dump the clutch, and drive that sucker up your uptight ass. "

see also 'dance music is shit' - reason: "we were listening to banco de gaia and sitting in crookes valley park and the sun was coming up and we were tripping on acid and everything was crazy colours and it was so spiritual etc etc etc"

Put crassly, some old guy liked some other old guy's music. So?
What's it to me?

i lke LB but not that piece; VM can eat a bag of dicks

(VM must have a voracious appetite)

-- mei (meirion.lewi...), July 31st, 2003.

Then why give a shit about anything?

-- David Allen (en@senbm), July 30th, 2003.

Many reasons to give a damn, but LB doesn't convince me to.

greil marcus's agenda pushing amounted to including two pieces on elvis and nothing on black sabbath. that and calling bangs "the best writer in america." gee, what a rotten guy. let it blurt, meanwhile, includes about a million "wow, what a slob lester was" anecdotes and next to nothing about his actual writing. conclusion: jim derogatis is a twat.

I still kill him with gun tho'.

I'm not going to read more just to check I'm as uninterested in it as I am in what I've already read.

I _am_ intrigued as to why he's so revered though.

I _am_ intrigued as to why he's so revered though.

Gee, so I guess you just want someone to explain it to you? If you're not interested enough to try and find out for yourself . . .

I don't want someone to explian LB to me, but rather why they like him. In fact there are a few good answers like that above, so I think my question's answered.

While we're on the subject can someone explain the appeal of REM or U2?

Psychotic Bobbins and Carburetor Challops

fascinating linguistic evolution - a technical term from the mills is generalised to mean rubbish in lancs dialect and in this vein used to refer to techno(?) in a thread title on an online message board and this definition sticks for years among people who have never seen a bobbin or been to manchester

bangs is using it literally I assume

something similar could be said about challops where the ILM usage (roughly hot takes?) is closer but still different from the definition I was familiar with (balls) but idk what the original meaning is or where it comes from

a little bit of this and that

That sounds more like gubbins than bobbins tbh.

Challops = challenging opinions

Yeah that might have been the cover story of the circa 1973 Creem issue with a giant quaalude on the cover.

It is entirely possible that I am conflating articles, but in the one I am thinking of he said of cocaine, "It will make you feel like the greatest person in the world. Yes, even greater than Erik Estrada." That would put it in at least 1977, although I am not sure how much sense that makes, since he left Creem in 1976.

it’s more that the person posting thinks they’re posting a challenging opinion, isn’t it? Like, “there, I’ve said it”

re challops

i can't really read lester anymore. he's better when you are young and dumb and reading bukowski or whoever. and he's very dude. i do like that eno thing! but he could be really dense in a cringey way. or it seems like that now. like people have said, he was young when he died. i think i was older than 33 when i STARTED writing rockcrit. i definitely stole from him. couldn't help it really. i grew up with creem. and the voice.
cool thing: i read at nyu at one of those conferences and jim miller was the moderator and after he said to me "i used to edit lester bangs and i know how hard it is to do what you just did." !!!! i thought that was cool. (i didn't have the heart to tell him that it wasn't THAT hard. but i did work the thing i wrote pretty hard.)

And his drug of choice was fuckin' cough syrup, ferchrissakes.

OG lean addict! he probably would have been a big dj screw fan if he had lived.

I don’t know what it’s particularly a sign of, but someone has to cite or write their own version of the The White Noise Supremacists article every so often. I remember that happening 20 years ago, and recently a guy who was in a popular band at that time wrote his own! Carlos D didn’t even bother to mention Lester despite hitting all the same notes