Lester Bangs - Classic or Carburetor Dung?

"Best" appearance by an erstwhile rock critic playing a fictional role must go to Jann Wenner's performance as Mark Roth in Perfect.

...which he managed to parlay a couple years later into a reoccurring role as a government attorney on Crime Story.

I'm extremely doubtful that someone who was as much of a twitching exposed nerve ending as Bangs would be the same person at 75 that he was at 30.

I mean some of my favourite stuff of his is the more melancholy later work where he was negotiating with the asshole he'd been when he was younger, and trying to find a way to finesse that earlier energy into something more thoughtful and humanistic. The mea culpa element of White Noise Terrorists is definitely powerful. I love the spewing-lava-gush of his earlier stuff, the torrent of word and thought and amphetamine-induced-articulacy, but I'll stan harder for the more humanist stuff in his later work. And the Miles piece in the second anthology is one of my favourite pieces, not least because he seems to locate the emotion in those records, the pain and the sadness.

If Lester Bangs was alive today he'd probably have a smartphone :O

Post under “technological/practical backwards steps……”!

If Lester Bangs were alive today he’d be frantically scraping the inside of his coffin.

Anyway, reflective/humanist Bangs is what elevates him into one of the greats.

are the things that made him cool to boomers even legible to zoomers who aren't steeped in rock mythology?

trying to imagine him as a youtuber doesn't work for me because there isn't an equivalent kind of cultural fixation - even people who love marvel movies don't think they're changing the world or anything. maybe he could get into crypto

even people who love marvel movies don't think they're changing the world or anything.

They absolutely do.

Without wanting to be too Chuck Klosterberg about it, I sometimes think that someone like Blindboy, building a huge audience by riffing on Limerick streetwear, Greek mythology, mental health and Westlife is the closest thing to LB today.

I get what draws some people to him but (after trying a few times) he wasn’t my bag, so to speak.

They absolutely do.

that's a real shame and speaks to the extent to which we've come to believe that change can only ever be handed down from on high

it strikes me as *much more* delusional than someone in 68 thinking rock is the revolution

i saw lester bangs once! he was promoting his blondie book in some bookstore. don't remember much about it except lenny kaye was there and they were trading some barbs back and forth. how could you not like lester? he gave me the ears to hear 'raw power' back when. he had a way of sharing his excitement.

trying to find a way to finesse that earlier energy into something more thoughtful and humanistic

What I meant about signs of him adapting later on. (Which makes it sound contrived--it wasn't.) But I think there'd always be a part of him that would cross a line and end up saying things that would cause him trouble today, especially in view of how Christgau and Marcus still get taken to task for things they write. Not like some of the more egregious things he wrote, but I don't see him doing a lot of self-censoring or second-guessing himself.

I think I'm less interested in thinking about him today (which let's be honest he'd be another writer with a substack and a twitter account trying to scrape by like anyone else, hopefully able to trade off his name like marcus and xgau to get enough work), i don't think any kind of fan fiction about oh my god he'd love l'rain and PC music or whatever...that's just fantasy stuff, he'd be old and probably not super engaged with modern pop culture -- i wouldn't rule out a later in life jazz turn either

i'd be more curious how he would have engaged in the late 80s through late 90s, the second flowering of the American underground stuff he'd be so obsessed with (Matador, Drag City etc etc) through the post-Nirvana alt explosion...a real mass culture explosion that was explicitly rooted in punk and post punk. i wonder if he would have been excited about it or think it was a perversion of or second rate copy of the stuff he loved?

"How would Orson Welles have directed Ant-Man?" is not the kind of slash fic we should read.

xp Yeah, that’s OTM… I wonder too.

What would (person who died decades ago) be like today always less about the person themselves and more about whatever axes the poster has to grind with their era, so kinda useful on that account.

i wouldn't rule out a later in life jazz turn either

i mean, his favourite album was The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady and he attacked James Chance for trying to (racistly) paper over his debt to Ayler

oh yeah i just meant like retreating into old jazz and stuff like that and not really engaged w/anything modern - that's not uncommon

there's days i feel like doing that lol

oh yes indeed, same!

my dad used to drive us through london pointing out the tiny basements where he saw hendrix play, the last year of his life he was dead into cassettes of oscar peterson playing verrrrrry quietly, and celine dion. it's the arc.

I remember Lester did an article summarizing various drugs. I was about 12 at the time, it felt so subversive.

Yeah that might have been the cover story of the circa 1973 Creem issue with a giant quaalude on the cover. To everything turn turn turn, there is a season etc

I do wish Lester would've written his proposed version of Four Lives In the Bebop Business, which included Brian Eno, Lydia Lunch and I forget who else.

was it Arto Lindsay and Adele Bertei

non-joke answer: it was eno, lunch, marianne faithfull, and screamin’ jay hawkins or robbie robertson or danny fields

Ah Danny Fields definitely. But your first answer sounded plausible. Bangs championed DNA and cf her recent memoir, Adele has lived a full life in and outside of the music business.

There's an extensive version of his Eno article online: https://www.furious.com/perfect/bangseno.html

i just liked the idea of a "four lives in the NO WAVE business" potboiler quickie

loving that Eno piece, thank you!

dying @ this:

"As many critics have pointed out (and as Eno himself noted in the liner notes to Discreet Music), this is very close to Erik Satie, who wanted to make music that could "mingle with the sound of the knives and forks at dinner." (Perhaps this is why Pierre Boulez once wrote an essay entitled "Erik Satie: Spineless Dog.")"

V early bobbins usage too

this is a little off topic but i've never quite understood what ilm "bobbins" meant? (outside of its sewing meaning which it must mean something else?)

I've assumed it means dance music that makes you "bob" your head up and down, but I might be wrong? It did take me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what "challops" meant

ahhh okay yeah i'm bad a catching things like that

I don't know what it means on ILM but...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bobbins

a little bit of this and that

derives from the Lancashire cotton mills, I think.

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