Lester Bangs Quotes

#1. The Mekons are the most revolutionary group in the history of rock 'n' roll.

Lester Bangs

#2. Sometimes I think nothing is simple but the feeling of pain.

Lester Bangs

#3. Irving Berlin said, "Popular music is popular because a lot of people like it." That doesn't mean it's good or bad - that's the equivalent of arguing the merits of hotdogs versus hamburgers. What the hell difference does it make?

Lester Bangs

#4. I don't see that there are any particular changes in popular music.

Lester Bangs

#5. The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience.

Lester Bangs

#6. Rock 'n' roll is an attitude, it's not a musical form of a strict sort. It's a 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

#7. I hate Stanley Clark, but I have to admit he's playing Jazz whether I like it or not.

Lester Bangs

#8. I'm not saying that all college students are subhuman - I'm just saying that if you aim to spend a few years mastering the art of pomposity, these are places where you can be taught by undisputed experts.

Lester Bangs

#9. Basically no, I mean I think that it's very easy to like I say, smoke a joint or even to wear a Chairman Mao button, or do a lot of these things with out knowing what's behind it, and what it really means.

Lester Bangs

#10. 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

#11. I mean Iggy and The Stooges first couple of albums I think sold twenty five thousand between the two of them you know and so to talk in terms of an underground I mean you have to go really to the independent labels and things like that.

Lester Bangs

#12. Style is originality; fashion is fascism. The two are eternally and unalterably opposed.

Lester Bangs

#13. All humans are the same sex, except albinos.

Lester Bangs

#14. 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

#15. The thing is that, they all had real strong personalities and real distinct identities, and I don't find most of the groups that are coming out now really do.

Lester Bangs

#16. 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

#17. They wouldn't be heroes if they were infallible, in fact they wouldn't be heroes if they weren't miserable wretched dogs, the pariahs of the earth, besides which the only reason to build up an idol is to tear it down again.

Lester Bangs

#18. 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

#19. Music, you know, true music not just rock 'n' roll, chooses you.

Lester Bangs

#20. No I don't think it was a myth at all, anymore than what the recession that the whole country was experiencing was a myth, which obviously seems like it's going to get worse and worse.

Lester Bangs

#21. In fact I think now we've reached a point now, where the powers that be really have sort of vested interest in all of us being stoned out as much as possible all the time so we don't know what's going on, and we don't care.

Lester Bangs

#22. And doing so you can recreate yourself and you can also come up with something that is not only original and creative and artistic, but also maybe even decent, or moral if I can use words like that, or something that's like basically good.

Lester Bangs

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.

Lester Bangs

#26. It's much easier to wear a Chairman Mao button and shake your fists in the air and all that, then to actually read the Communist manifesto and things like that and actually become involved in politics.

Lester Bangs

#27. 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

#28. [Springsteen] sort of catarrh-mumbles his ditties in a disgruntled mushmouth like Robbie Robertson on Quaaludes with Dylan barfing down the back of his neck.

Lester Bangs

#29. No, I see it as meaning very little at the moment because none of the groups are about anything.

Lester Bangs

#30. That's one reason why it's pretty worthless, I can't totally buy it, if you think about it, it's things like the Phil Spector records. On one level they were rebellion, on another level they were keeping the teenager in his place.

Lester Bangs

#31. At its best New Wave/punk represents a fundamental and age-old Utopian dream: that if you give people the license to be as outrageous as they want in absolutely any fashion they can dream up, they'll be creative about it, and do something good besides.

Lester Bangs

#32. 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

#33. Sexual chaos reigns currently, but out of chaos may flow true understanding and harmony, and either way Elvis almost singlehandedly opened the floodgates.

Lester Bangs

#34. Most of them are pretty down records, pretty unhappy, pretty confused. Which only reflects how people in general were feeling, I mean really the sense that you get is society running down.

Lester Bangs

#35. John Lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once you've made your mark on history those who can't will be so grateful they'll turn it into a cage for you.

Lester Bangs

#36. 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

#37. The real question is what to live for. And I can't answer it. Except another one of your records. And another chance for me to write. Art for art's sake, corny as that sounds.

Lester Bangs

#38. A young woman is dead. I don't care. You probably don't care. The police don't care. The papers don't care. The punks for the most part don't care. The only people that care are (I suppose) her parents and (I'm almost certain) the boy accused of murdering her.

Lester Bangs

#39. I can guarantee you one thing, we will never agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis.

Lester Bangs

#40. The great thing about The Clash of course is that they keep searching for answers beyond that.

Lester Bangs

#41. I think that if most guys in America could somehow get their fave-rave poster girl in bed and have total license to do whatever they wanted with this legendary body for one afternoon, at least 75 percent of the guys in the country would elect to beat her up.

Lester Bangs

#42. 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

#43. I've always believed the New Left is rank.

Lester Bangs

#44. I mean the interesting thing I think would be if something happened like, what happened in England where all these kids that all of a sudden can't afford the ticket prices.

Lester Bangs

#45. All blues singers are great liars.

Lester Bangs

#46. 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

#47. (Punk rock is) lunging after some glimpse of a new and better world.

Lester Bangs

#48. Nothing ever quite dies, it just comes back in a different form.

Lester Bangs

#49. The only questions worth asking today are whether humans are going to have any emotions tomorrow, and what the quality of life will be if the answer is no.

Lester Bangs

#50. Here we are in the 70's when everything really is horrible and it really stinks. The mass media, everything on television everything everywhere is just rotten. You know it's just really boring and really evil, ugly and worse.

Lester Bangs

#51. Corporations are social organizations, the theater in which men and women realize or fail to realize purposeful and productive lives.

Lester Bangs

#52. Realizing that life is precious the natural tendency is to trample on it, like laughing at a funeral.

Lester Bangs

#53. Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Lester Bangs

#54. 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