Busting the Cult of Lester Bangs

I hate to speak ill of the dead, but if nobody else is going to say that Lester Bangs sucked, I guess I'm going to have to. But, wait, you most likely don't even know who Lester Bangs is. He was a rock critic who wrote for Rolling Stone, the Village Voice and, most notably, Creem in the Seventies and early Eighties. He died in 1982 at the age of thirty-three, probably from an overdose of Darvon -- one of his many cheesy drugs of choice, along with the cough syrup Romilar.

Like many a second-rate poet -- or musician, for that matter -- who died fashionably young, Bangs has become something of a cult figure. His following, however, is limited to the set of music writers who admire his gonzo style -- a Beat-derived spew of words that aims for Kerouac and occasionally rises to the level of the execrable Charles Bukowski. It's insultingly indulgent, the kind of adolescent self-aggrandizement -- now widely influential in music publications -- that makes it impossible for most literate human beings to take rock criticism at all seriously.

For the most part, the cult of Bangs consists of pallid imitators and dismissible hacks, though a few people who are smart enough to know better (notably Greil Marcus and screenwriter Cameron Crowe) wave his banner as well. Marcus assembled a posthumous collection of Bangs' work a few years back (Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung) and in the introduction, he wrote, "Perhaps what this book demands from a reader is a willingness to accept that the best writer in America could write almost nothing but record reviews." That's a ridiculous idea, and I'm not buying it -- especially if the writer in question is Lester Bangs.

Now Jim DeRogatis has written a full-blown biography (Let It Blurt: The Life & Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic) that has provided even greater fuel for the cult of Bangs. Miraculously, DeRogatis doesn't attempt to mimic Bangs' hyperactive style. Instead, in dutiful, turgid prose, he chronicles every nasal inhaler wick Bangs swallowed (I kid you not) and every belt of Romilar he swigged, evidently convinced that these desperate, pathetic excesses somehow linked Bangs to the "romantic tradition of madman as truth-teller."

Madman I'll accept, but what are the great truths Bangs told? There's far too many to cite, so a few examples will have to do. For one thing, Bangs sums up the incredibly exciting early years of hip-hop as follows: "Rap is nothing, or not enough." Since the epithets "nigger" and "spade" rolled quite easily off his lips, perhaps that's no surprise. His late realization that maybe some of his ideas were racist is, needless to say, treated by DeRogatis as a triumph of humanistic self-awareness. In other musical insights, Bangs treats the Beatles -- or anyone else interested in anything more than noise -- with enormous condescension, while every passably interesting, one-hit-wonder garage band is praised to the skies. Let it blurt, indeed.

But Bangs, of course, eventually aspired to writing about other subjects than music, which was far too limited a world for his ranging mind. Happily, however, his social observations are equally hilarious. He wanted to write a book about the lives of prostitutes, for instance. Guess what, he discovered that they have hearts of gold. One wide-eyed friend tells DeRogatis that, amid the gender wars of the Seventies, Bangs believed that "many people were turning to homosexuality that probably weren't homosexuals." DeRogatis would have us believe that the reluctance of editors to allow Bangs to explore such ideas at length was yet another example of genius being trampled by small minds.

Appropriately enough, masturbation is a running theme both of Lester's endlessly inquiring intellect and, consequently, of Let It Blurt. In my favorite moment in the book, Bangs asks fellow rock writers Nick Tosches and Richard Meltzer, "Do you ever get off better jerking off to pictures than fucking?" No three people were ever more suited to a subject.

But I don't mean to rag on Let It Blurt -- its luridness, no doubt, is exactly what its publisher wanted and, in any event, it's just a symptom of a larger cause. If people have a perception of rock critics as obsessed, overgrown geeks with more opinions than ideas, always searching for a free drink and a captive audience, Lester Bangs is the main reason why. And if people view rock criticism as gassy, unreadable nonsense written by immature nitwits who like nothing better than making stupid fun of the artists who are the only reason they have a job in the first place, that's Bang's fault, too.

Bangs cared a great deal about music, and he could occasionally be funny. I'll grant him that. But his influence far outweighs his talent -- then again, it would be hard for it not to -- and rock criticism is far more impoverished for it.

ANTHONY DECURTIS
(May 13, 2000)