Quotes by Lester Bangs

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

“They wouldnt be heroes if they were infallible, in fact they wouldnt be heroes if they werent miserable wretched dogs, the pariahs of the earth, besides which the only reason to build up an idol is to tear it down again.”

“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.”

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

“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, theyll be creative about it, and do something good besides.”

“The first mistake of art is to assume that its serious.”

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

“Mainlines”

Ill 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.

The first mistake of art is to assume that its serious.

Its not enough just to do those things anymore; what you must do instead if you want success on any large scale is either figure out a way of getting yourself associated in the audiences mind with their pieties and their sense of community, i.e. ram it home that youre one of THEM; or, alternately, deck and bake yourself into an image configuration so blatant or outrageous that you become a culture myth.

if the main reason we listen to music in the first place is to hear passion expressed- as ive believed all my life-then what good is this music going to prove to be? what does that say about us? what are we confirming in ourselves by doting on art that is emotionally neutral? and, simultaneously, what in ourselves might we be destroying or at least keeping down?

Theyre events you remember all your life, like your first real orgasm. And the whole purpose of the absurd, mechanically persistent involvement with recorded music is the pursuit of that priceless moment. So its not exactly that records might unhinge the mind, but rather that if anything is going to drive you up the wall it might as well be a record.

Like almost all of Beefhearts recorded work, it was not even ahead of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one.

Like almost all of Beefhearts recorded work, [Trout Mask Replica] was not even ahead of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one.

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