89 Quotes by Lester Bangs

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’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.

Like almost all of Beefheart’s 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.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t see that there are any particular changes in popular music.

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