Lester Plays Vegas (April 30)
Apr. 30th, 2012 07:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotOn one level I suppose all of this is very funny, but if you look past the surface violence and simple abusiveness to the person at the center it's not funny at all. The reason it's not is the aforementioned ambivalence. Jungle war with bike gangs is one thing, but it gets a little more complicated when those of us who love being around that war (at least vicariously) have to stop to consider why and what we're loving. Because one of the things we're loving is self-hate, and another may well be a human being committing suicide. Here's a quote from a review of Iggy's new live show in the British rock weekly Sounds: "Iggy's a dancer and more, a hyper-active packet of muscle and sinew straight out of Michelangelo's wet dreams... who leaps and claws at air, audience and mike stand in an unsurpassable display that spells one thing—MEAT." Ignoring the florid prose, I'd like to ask the guy who wrote that how he would like to be thought of as a piece of meat, how he thinks the meat feels. Or if he thinks it feels at all. Yeah, Iggy's got a fantastic body; it's so fantastic he's crying in every nerve to explode out of it into some unimaginable freedom. It's as if someone writhing in torment has made that writing into a kind of poetry, and we watch in awe of such beautiful writhing, so impressed that we perhaps forget what inspired it in the first place.
--Lester Bangs, "Iggy Pop: Blowtorch In Bondage," Village Voice, 28 March 1977
I remember, not well, someone having written, probably in the early '70s, maybe a letter to the editor, maybe it was to Creem, and someone wrote maybe a brief reply to the letter, maybe unsigned, maybe it was Lester who wrote the reply. The writer was lamenting the absence of Buddy Holly. If Buddy had lived, he'd be doing great things, said the letter, said the writer. And the reply was No! If Buddy had lived he'd being playing Vegas just like any other oldie living off his past, his work no longer mattering except as a walking corpse of a reminder that it once had mattered.
So Lester. He never totally got his shit together, not just chemically but intellectually. But he didn't give up. If he asked a question, the question didn't disappear, didn't get a glib answer from him and then evaporate or hang around like a vague fart, a mist of buzzwords answered by another mist of buzzwords. The questions gnawed at him, repeated, didn't leave him alone.
If he'd lived, I think it would have made a difference. I don't know what his follow-through would have been — he could get lost in an enthusiasm of words and anguish — but I know there would have been one. Maybe it'd just end up as Lester's filibuster. But the questions would ride him, would at least fight to stay addressed. And this is where Lester is different from all my colleagues. I complain from time to time that rock critics, music critics, people in my rockwrite/musicwrite/wrong world, don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation. My complaints don't help anybody, since whatever the message is in my own writing, the idea that there's a joy in discovery, in unearthing the unknown, that you interact with what's in front of you, with the everyday, and see a new world each time you look, each time you act, but only by thinking, testing, challenging, re-wording and re-phrasing — this message doesn't get across, doesn't get felt, I guess. There's a basic unshakable dysfunction and incompetence in my world, which amounts to dishonesty, a pretense of thought without actual thinking.
Don't know that Lester really knew how either, but given that the conversation, the questions, wouldn't leave him, I imagine he'd have given it a shot.
--Lester Bangs, "Iggy Pop: Blowtorch In Bondage," Village Voice, 28 March 1977
I remember, not well, someone having written, probably in the early '70s, maybe a letter to the editor, maybe it was to Creem, and someone wrote maybe a brief reply to the letter, maybe unsigned, maybe it was Lester who wrote the reply. The writer was lamenting the absence of Buddy Holly. If Buddy had lived, he'd be doing great things, said the letter, said the writer. And the reply was No! If Buddy had lived he'd being playing Vegas just like any other oldie living off his past, his work no longer mattering except as a walking corpse of a reminder that it once had mattered.
So Lester. He never totally got his shit together, not just chemically but intellectually. But he didn't give up. If he asked a question, the question didn't disappear, didn't get a glib answer from him and then evaporate or hang around like a vague fart, a mist of buzzwords answered by another mist of buzzwords. The questions gnawed at him, repeated, didn't leave him alone.
If he'd lived, I think it would have made a difference. I don't know what his follow-through would have been — he could get lost in an enthusiasm of words and anguish — but I know there would have been one. Maybe it'd just end up as Lester's filibuster. But the questions would ride him, would at least fight to stay addressed. And this is where Lester is different from all my colleagues. I complain from time to time that rock critics, music critics, people in my rockwrite/musicwrite/wrong world, don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation. My complaints don't help anybody, since whatever the message is in my own writing, the idea that there's a joy in discovery, in unearthing the unknown, that you interact with what's in front of you, with the everyday, and see a new world each time you look, each time you act, but only by thinking, testing, challenging, re-wording and re-phrasing — this message doesn't get across, doesn't get felt, I guess. There's a basic unshakable dysfunction and incompetence in my world, which amounts to dishonesty, a pretense of thought without actual thinking.
Don't know that Lester really knew how either, but given that the conversation, the questions, wouldn't leave him, I imagine he'd have given it a shot.
From Chuck Eddy Who Is Too Lazy To Sign In
Date: 2012-05-01 10:47 pm (UTC)Brad Shoup I like, even as I'm indicted.
about an hour ago · Like
Chuck Eddy Yeah, me too.
about an hour ago · Like
Alfred Soto I certainly wouldn't turn down Vegas.
about an hour ago · Like · 1
David Williams Ouch.
about an hour ago · Like
Michael Daddino My problem with Kogan's concern, as he's voiced it for the last couple years, is that I honestly don't know what an intellectual conversation is supposed to look like. Or how "a joy in discovery, in unearthing the unknown" is supposed to square with something that's presumably, I dunno, *sustained*.
about an hour ago · Like
Scott Seward i'm glad he was talking about you guys and not me. i always ask the hard questions.
59 minutes ago · Unlike · 4
Chuck Eddy You might have a point, Michael. Honestly, I feel like I've detached myself so much from what passed for a conversation (one in which I used to be a fairly active participant, I think), that I'm pretty sure I'd have no idea if an intellectual conversation was going on even if there was one. But I have to give Frank credit for still looking, prodding, and caring about it, long after I decided I didn't have time for such things -- even if this has been his own obsession, or shtick, for at least 30 years now, which can make him sound like a broken record sometimes. (Sometimes I *like* broken records.)
43 minutes ago · Like
Scott Seward you ever read this: http://thehoundblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/lester-bangs.html
Scott Seward uh kinda long but basically says that lester was pretty burnt out on rockcrit by the time he died. so, who knows what he would have ended up doing had he lived.
34 minutes ago · Like
Scott Seward but james marshall also says there was very little racism in the punk scene in the 70's, so, a grain of salt...
32 minutes ago · Like
Chuck Eddy Has there ever been any question that he was burnt out on rock-crit at the time, though? That was pretty obvious from the last Pazz & Jop ballot he filed, I would think. (That doesn't necessarily mean something might not have revived his interest later, though.)
20 minutes ago · Like
Maura Johnston I was going to ask what an "intellectual conversation" looked like, too. I mean obviously there are a host of conditions that exist in 2012 that I don't think existed back in Bangs's heyday -- the economics of being a "leader" in that conversation are chief among them, and probably guiding a lot of the others. Believe me when I say I would love to have more than the meager amounts of time I do currently have to process and think and let questions gnaw at me, and I suspect other people involved -- whether paid or unpaid! -- would as well.
If anything, the questions gnawing at me are the ones I *don't* write about because the limited time I do have to do anything on the topic wouldn't give the topics at hand justice. (Off the top of my head, I can think of that Foxy Shazam song about big black asses becoming a hit on whiter-than-white rock radio, the ethics of disco edits and crediting in the age of contextless digital listening as inspired by that Kindness song I like biting Trouble Funk, etc. Shoot, the How Not To Write About Women piece that I did a few months back was the product of long-simmering annoyance at things I'd seen -- like, *years* of it, which is why I used that RS cover from the '90s as its illustration.)
5 minutes ago · Like
Re: From Chuck Eddy Who Is Too Lazy To Sign In
Date: 2012-05-02 09:12 am (UTC)