Lester Bangs Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“I don't see that there are any particular changes in popular music.”

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

“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.”

“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.”