Quote #1

O.K., I'm a rock critic. I also write and record music. I write poetry, fiction, straight journalism, unstraight journalism, beatnik drivel, mortifying love letters, death threats to white jazz critics signed 'The Mau Maus of East Harlem,' and once a year my own obituary (latest entry: 'He was promising...').

More from Lester Bangs

  1. I was in high school (oh, I told you - that was kind of where they put you when they didn't know what to do with you - when you were too bi…
  2. Things started to go downhill. Instead of singing about taking tea with Mary Jane and boppin' your dingus on ol' Sweet Slit Annie it was He…
  3. The top rockers have a mythic aura about them, the 'superstar,' and that's a basically unhealthy state of things, in fact it's the very vir…
  4. By the end of the decade it had become obvious that perhaps the one constant of our variegated and strung-out peer groups was a pervasive s…
  5. The trend toward narcissistic flair has been responsible in large part for smiting rock with the superstar virus, which revolves around the…
  6. The extravagant and ostentatious lifestyles that pass for charisma in a time when almost anybody talks about charisma but if you think abou…
  7. What all this posturing and fake glamor results in is a vast detachment and cynicism on the part of the artists. Since it's impossible to h…
  8. 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.

All Lester Bangs quotes