lowquality.net

I know it might be kind of a hip­ster thing to idol­ize Lester Bangs, but I really wish there were more crit­ics in our time that found fault with the cur­rent state of rock and roll and could express their feel­ings as elo­quently as he did in a time that many regard as the great­est span rock and roll ever expe­ri­enced. If he’d lived into the 90’s I’m sure he would have died of boredom.

In this quo­ta­tion, Lester is com­ment­ing on an inci­dent that occurred where some­one in his audi­ence threw a pie at Alice Cooper dur­ing a per­for­mance and rather than freak out and go “Axl Rose” on some­one he pro­ceeded to mash the pie into his face and mock himself.

From a lester bangs arti­cle, circa 1970

“The point … is not to elicit sym­pa­thy for Alice Cooper, but rather to point out that in a way Alice Cooper is bet­ter than Ritche Havens (even though both make dull music) because at least with Alice Cooper you have the pre­rog­a­tive to express your reac­tion to his show in a cre­ative way. Most rock stars have their audi­ences so cowed it’s nau­se­at­ing. What blessed jus­tice it would be if all rock stars had to con­tend with what A.C. elic­its, if it became a com­mon prac­tice and method of pass­ing judge­ment for audi­ences to reg­u­larly fling pies in the faces of per­form­ers who they thought were com­ing on with a load of bull­shit. Because the top rock­ers have a mythic aura around them, “the super­star,” and that’s a basi­cally unhealthy state of things, in fact it’s the very virus that’s fuck­ing up rock, a sub­species of the virus I spoke of ear­lier which infests “our” cul­ture from pop­stars to pol­i­tics (imag­ine throw­ing a pie in the face of Eldridge Cleaver! Joan Baez!), and which the Stooges uncat­e­gor­i­cally oppose as an advance pla­toon in the near­ing war to clear conned nar­colep­tic mind­screens of the earth, even­tu­ally lib­er­at­ing us all from basi­cally uncre­ative lifestyles in which peo­ple often lack­ing half the tal­ent or per­son­al­ity or charisma of you or I are ele­vated into god­like posi­tions. Pure pomp and circumstance.“