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

Categorized in : People Dream Fashion

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.

idols hero dog

The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious. by Lester Bangs

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

mistake art firsts

Good rock 'n' roll is something that makes you feel alive. It's something that's human, and I think that most music today isn't. ... To me good rock 'n' roll also encompasses other things, like Hank Williams and Charlie Mingus and a lot of things that aren't strictly defined as rock 'n' roll. 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.

writing attitude thinking

Style is originality; fashion is fascism. The two are eternally a... by Lester Bangs

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

style fashion two

Music, you know, true music not just rock 'n' roll, chooses you. by Lester Bangs

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

rock-n-roll rocks knows

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.

rocks beautiful looks

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.

college years art

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.

quality asking answers

Look at it this way: There are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100 percent, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation.

anxiety nerves views

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.

block stupid hero

I'll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette.

reading writing book

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

life-is-precious funeral laughing

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.

pieces shining culture

Sometimes I think nothing is simple but the feeling of pain. by Lester Bangs

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

pain simple thinking

Personally I feel that real rock 'n' roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.

real islands past

... the twin concepts of nihilism and the antihero have had it. What began with The Wild One and James "nobody understands me" Dean, ran with increasing vehement negativism up through the Stones and Velvets and Iggy ... [I]t may be time, in spite of all indications to the contrary from the exterior society, to begin thinking in terms of heroes again, of love instead of hate, of energy instead of violence, of strength instead of cruelty, of action instead of reaction.

hate hero thinking

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

rocks writing attitude

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.

rocks arise should

The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience. by Lester Bangs

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

contempt sin reality

I can guarantee you one thing, we will never agree on anything as... by Lester Bangs

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

one-thing agree guarantees