Worthwhile Reading

Since I'm still computer challenged at this point I'm going to recommend you read the following bit of music minutae, an extremely engrossing essay on the late, great Lester Bangs. Music critic for Creem magazine and all around scuzzbag. Love him or hate him (I'm of the former camp), this is one interesting and insightful read.

Big Bangs Theory

In Almost Famous, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the late rock critic Lester Bangs onscreen. But the only way to get Bangs right is to get Bangs on paper.

By David Pulizzi

Late one evening about two years ago I was reading about one dead man, Elvis Presley, when I encountered the work of another, Lester Bangs. I was well into the endnotes of Mystery Train, Greil Marcus' popular treatise on rock music. Following a couple dozen pages of detailed notes on Presley, Marcus arrives at what he calls "the finest, or the most final, words of obituary spoken on the occasion of Elvis Presley's death. Lester Bangs was writing in the Village Voice, August 29, 1977, in a piece titled 'How Long Will We Care?'":

If love is truly going out of fashion, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each other's objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation's many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis's. But I can guarantee you one thing; we will never agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won't bother saying goodbye to his corpse. I will say goodbye to you.

Those were the first words of Bangs' I had ever encountered and they numbed my brain for a while.
...read the rest HERE