Who is the next Lester Bangs?

i'm not sure but i will try my damndest to fit them in

They all start with bangs as their hero.

Then they have to write something pos. about a band they can't stand.

So either they do and bangs goes otdawindow.

or they don't and job goes outdawindow.

I wish I could read books as fast as that robot from Short Circut.

Bangs is an outlier here - he's the most famous rockcrit ever; he's also the only famous one.

and you wondered why the music criticism in said free weeklies is so often so gut-wrenchingly awful.

Someone create a system of blog grants to be given to talented bloggers and raconteurs. You could be the Medici of the 21 century!

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Haha, yes, very very true. I mean, who are Ben Watson's two biggest heroes? Zappa and Derek Bailey. I still tend to read his stuff where I will skip over someone like David Keenan, to pluck a name from the ether.

OMFG LEON NEYFAKH TO THREAD~`!!

If Greil Marcus had died in a car crash (I can't imagine him ODing) he'd be ever bit a lionized as Bangs. (He is already in a lot of circles...you want famous? he was name-checked in "The Corrections.") Fortunately, he lived long enough to seen as out-of-touch.

Critcs like Bangs and Marcus (and Christgau and Meltzer) had two advantages: they were first, and innovators always get a disproportionate amount of attention...

And there weren't that many good critics writing then. So they stood out. The early Pazz Jop polls were, what? twenty, thirty people? All the good critics and some of the bad.

There are probably a couple of dozen critics right now (some post to this board) who are writing at the level of Bangs everyday. You want the next Lester Bangs? S/he is among you.

If you're the type who idolizes pipe-smoking college professors with patches on the elbows of their tweed jackets

I'm not picking on you, i swear. Just wondering how you got a feel for Bang's tastes by never reading anything he wrote.And listening to and discovering music on your own is great, but 9 times out of 10 this won't help you become a better writer.Reading other good writers, however, can be really helpful.

In the age of blogzzzzzzzz I think there's a lot to be said for not copping your style from whatever print media, assuming you're halfway literate in the first place. How many music writers were there for Bangs to rip off, even if he'd wanted to?

To address Scott's point, I don't share musical preferences with a lot of the music writers I like to read.

As I said, I;m not claiming to be anythinh like an expert on Bangs' tastes... it's just that of the various articles I've had a chance to read by him, none of them have been on subjects I remotely care about.

Reading other writers (not specifically critics, possibly especially not critics) can help improve your style, but that's as much practice makes perfect as anything else. It won't help your ideas about music in the slightest.

Is it bad to want to write about music but to have never even heard of Greil Marcus?

Not really, he's not exactly a looming figure in the world of music journalism these days, but you should read the league table of deaths in 70s rock he did. It's funny.

(Not to say I don't like Lester Bangs.)

This is exactly why I said "Hopefully, nobody".

(note: not giving you shit for this, Anthony. Klosterman on the other hand...)

the only thing as bad as wanting to be 'the next lester bangs' is someone striving to be 'the next paul morley' (and failing).

Pfffft to you. If you don't like Prindle you PENIS VAGINA GAY JOKE.

"the faux-Beat Romilar-swilling pride of El
Cajon, California, the daddy of us all, immortal rock scribe ..."

-- some pub, Somewhere City, USA

"[Bangs] did some of his best work interleaved with ... cough-syrup binges."

-- they've even heard of him in Alaska, from
a newspaper staffed by your typical dumbshits

He really, really loved Romilar, they wrote.

go home, doomie.

The terrifying thing is that he IS home.

So maybe the new Lester Bangs is 3-6 Maffia. Or Michael Watts.

Yeah, they traded Gangsta Boo for him, which is totally unfair since she looks so much cuter in glasses, but what can you do? They're gonna do a song called "We Are All Ho's" now.

Like the screwed and chopped guys ... THEY'RE certainly doing their own thing. ;-)

Back when I was an editor, I used to get about three or four submissions a month from people who wanted to be the next Lester Bangs, as in aping his tone directly but without his wit or insight. They usually went straight into the circular file.

If somebody wanted to be, say, the M.F.K. Fisher of grime, THAT would pique my interest.

i dislike william swygart's writing.
i like dom passantino's writing despite myself.
tim finney is probably the best writer on these pages.

with these examples there's something very simple that separates a good writer from a bad writer.

work it out.

Fuck Lester Bangs. His legacy is so overplayed. We will never have another Bangs just like we will never have another Ted Nugent.

How neat! That's very her, I have to say -- I hope she's doing well. :-)

Well I'm not actively avoiding Bangs or anyone else on a matter of principle, I just haven't found anything they've written which I want to spend time reading and I'm not going to go out of my way to research them. You're right, you never know what will help your ideas about music... but ancient music criticism raving about music I don't give a shit about is hardly likely to help me more than anything else in life. I pay far more attention to most of the people on this board simply because what they write about is so much more relevant to me. Then again I'm the only person I know who likes reading music criticism best AFTER I hear an album so what do I know.

Fuck Lester Bangs.

etc blah blah wank wank

I say fuck you sirs and madams for your worthless, trite insights.

This thread wasn't even intended to be about ripping of Bangs or Bangs itself. I was just posing the questions:

a) Has Rock Criticism fundamentally changed due to blogging?

b) If so can there be a rockcrit in this new paradigm (ha) that has such a great influence or wide readership or legacy etc as Bangs or Marcus or Metzler?

Why is this so hard? Everyone thinks they are thinking of clever news ways to say Lester Bangs is overrated. THIS is a problem w/criticism - people who will pan things just to be cute or what have you when really there is no conviction behind it. At least Bangs had actual non-ironic emotion about music instead of just being a penis and only concerned with constant one-ups-man-ship and kill yr idols masturbation.

i like to do this, too...

i'm reading "psychotic reactions and carburetor dung" right now and it's great. his passion and conviction are really inspiring.

I wasn't necesarily expecting criticism, but I guess I wasn't expecting so many people to keep parroting what had already been said here and at the Lester Bangs C or D thread. I don't mind if people are joking around or off the cuff or in other non-critical type modes, but I did think a lot of whats been said was pointless and uninteresting. Which isn't normally true of this website.

And I won't bother 'proving' someone was being ironic - whats the point? Surely I could find multiple examples if I wanted, just as you could find things to the contrary.

The music blogosphere is basically a refined (globally accessible, free at point of use) version of 80s fanzine culture and has a similarly tiny but influential readership. Some of the people in the blogosphere will go on to become 'the new' Simon Reynolds; some maybe 'the new' James Brown; some 'the new' Kevin Pearce. (Sorry for the UK centric examples, I don't know about 80s US fanzines). Blogging has very little to do with yr other question about rock critics with wider clout - there won't be a 'new' Bangs/Marcus/Meltzer because what the market expects and wants from rock criticism is so different now; the Internet has a tiny bit to do with that but mostly it's that rock itself has been around a while and everyone knows what they like now.

Here is a quote from an email I recieved today:

There's a not bad interview with Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks in the Guardian today. The description of Wilson's recent meeting with the Queen is quite funny ('Paul McCartney kept cutting in. He was drunk').

Will I read it though? NOOOOOOOOOOO!

While this study is concerned with the question of technology in its relationin its relation to the work of Lester Bangs and theories of hypertext, it is also, and more specifically, addressed to a concept of technology arising from the language of Finnegans Wake. Drawing upon developments in communication theory and information technology, this study attempts to map a parallel development in BANGS's uses of language in the Wake, arguing that BANGS's writing provides a model for re-thinking the relationship between technology and "all forms of cultural production." The purpose of this is not, however, to suggest that BANGS was necessarily in some way cognisant of a future possibility of hypertext, nor is it simply concerned with a retrospective glance at BANGS from the position of current computing technologies. Rather, it is to examine how BANGS's work is aware of its own position against and within contemporary developments in the sciences and electronic media, and that BANGS incorporated material from these developments into his texts.

Consequently, this study is concerned with the ways in which BANGS's text can be said to solicit hypertext: from constituting a non-sequential writing, to deploying itself as a type of textual apparatus or machine, to motivating a type of hypertextual genetics. The question here centres on the notion of solicitation-the extent to which BANGS's text can be said to both call for and motivate a hypertextuality irreducible to a stable field, or placement, whereby a text could be defined in relation to a structural episteme. At the same time solicitation is shown in BANGS's text not to be merely an affect or even a strategy of writing, but rather as something inherent to language itself.

Amongst textual theorists who have engaged with the notion of solicitation, the one whose conception of language is closest to BANGS's own is Jacques Derrida, for whom "BANGS's ghost is always coming on board, even in the most academic pieces of writing." Derrida's work on and with BANGS has been extensive, beginning in 1962 with his introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry, although most of his work has taken the form of a "haunting" where BANGS appears to stand behind Derrida as a writerly éminance grise. BANGS's "ghost" may be said to animate a certain deconstruction from both within Derrida's writing and on the margins of that writing, as what we might call the figure of solicitation (both paradigm and deus ex machina of the Derridean corpus itself). In his 1963 essay 'Force and Signification,' Derrida relates solicitation to an implicit lability:

Structure is perceived through the incidence of menace, at the moment when imminent danger concentrates our vision on the keystone of an institution, the stone which encapsulates both the possibility and the fragility of its existence. Structure then can be methodically threatened in order to be comprehended more clearly and to reveal not only its supports but also that secret place in which it is neither construction nor ruin but lability. This operation is called (from the Latin) soliciting. In other words, shaking in a way related to the whole (from sollus, in archaic Latin "the whole," and from citare, "to put in motion").

Situating this concept of solicitation within the context of twentieth-century philosophical discourses on technology, it is possible to elaborate a number of implications for hypertext which touch upon our fundamental understanding of language.

One of the more significant texts in this regard is Martin Heidegger's essay, 'The Question Concerning Technology,' which in many ways provided the initial theoretical impetus for this book. Heidegger's notion of enframing is seminal to the understanding of how hypertext can be thought as operating across the assumed boundaries of the semantic field, as well as all other fields of signifying convention. Among the issues that arise here is how the solicitation of hypertext would mark, as Samuel Weber puts it, a way "in which the 'technics' of Heidegger's quest(ion) entails the destabilisation of such fields," and how this solicitation as a general bringing-forth might be regarded simultaneously as a function of poiesis and of technics, both "originary" and mechanical production, reproduction or repetition. In other words, how this solicitation would describe what BANGS terms a "paradox lust," operating somewhere between the concepts of techne and logos. Similarly, in light of the various recent developments in the application of computing science within the field of BANGSan scholarship, the question arises as to what it might imply if we were to approach hypertext as a particular technology, as technological-what the word "technology" might signify in the context of BANGS's writing practice-keeping in mind Heidegger's assertion that "techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poetic."

As this study comprises a more or less transverse exploration of BANGSan hypertext, the discussion itself, or rather the various notations assembled here as prefatory to some future discussion, will unfold topically. In this process, certain theoretical approaches will be examined in greater or lesser detail, but the actual study will be shaped along lines consonant with the demands of BANGS's writing and in accordance with the structural tropology implicit to a basic conceptualisation of hypertext itself. Broadly speaking, however, this study is orientated around three key objectives. Firstly, to trace the historical development of communications technologies in the context of BANGS's writing-taking into consideration the broad philosophical and sociological impact of technology at the time in which BANGS was composing Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Secondly, to trace some of the effects of communications technologies upon scholarship generally, and upon BANGSan scholarship in particular. And thirdly, to investigate the ways in which technology per se is involved in a "communication" with BANGS's language in Finnegans Wake. Hence the purpose of this study can be elaborated as follows:

1. To outline the historical necessity of considering BANGS's writing in terms of technological development in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe-thereby placing BANGS within the context of such writers as Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Cendrars, Marinetti and so on. The question here, however, is not simply one of historical contextualisation, but of mapping the development of a particular contemporary poetics which can be shown to be bound up with the evolution of communications technologies and with the impact this evolution has had upon language in general.

2. To investigate ways in which technology has effected aspects of BANGS scholarship. The question here is twofold. Firstly, how such "technologies" as hypertext have provided a means of presenting annotated works, archives, and genetic texts. And secondly, how these means have provided insights into the structural logic of BANGS's language itself, particularly with regards to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

3. To attempt a critique of Heidegger's formulation linking technology to poiesis. The point of departure here being the question of the structure and unity of the Wakean "figures" H.C.E. and A.L.P. These are seen to function alternately as "acrostic grids," "desiring machines," "strange attractors," and so on, which mark out points of intersection or communication between otherwise non-communicating textual elements. This question involves further issues of identity, myth and the technological-mechanical basis of signification, in terms of what we might also call "genetic strands." This "genetics," however, may be seen to disappoint a general hermeneutics, investing the logic of the "genetic master key" with a type of viral flaw. For this reason it is a question of situating the hypertextual condition of BANGS's writing as something belonging to, and solicited by, a BANGSan poetics, and not as a set of normative procedures imposed from outside. As Heidegger suggests, "not praxis but poiesis may enable us to confront the essential unfolding of technology."

Not so, Ned!

Cathi has written a fantastic column for the first issue of Loose Lips Sink Ships, which publishes on February 14th. It also features writing from Neil Kulkarni, The Lex, Sophie Harris, Everett True, Mary Lockett, David McNamee, Gracelette, Nendie Pinto-Duchinsky, Ben Myers, John Robb, Preston W Long, myself and, of course, Ned Raggett, on subjects as diverse as Mark Lanegan, Liars, Erykah Badu, My Morning Jacket, Madlib, Immortal Lee County Killers, Sebadoh, Cass McCombs, Bardo Pond, The Mars Volta, Morrisseyland, Shit & Shine, The Armed, Fake Ideal, Kill Kenada, Devics and The Icarus Line, along with artistic contributions from Kurt Wagner and Scout Niblet, and photography from Steve Gullick and others and illustrations from Andrew Clare, Tom E Genower and others.

[/advertorial]

Kris Kirk means more to me that Lester Bangs.

!!! :-) That is so freakin' cool. Please pass on to her that I'm a fan!

and, of course, Ned Raggett

Christ, not THAT idiot again. Yer mag is sunk already.

I've heard about Kris Kirk but regrettably only know a few things about him. Quick precis, anyone?

And it's out of season
To be Ralph J. Gleason

Better to work in porno
Than be Theodor W. Adorno

But the new Lester Bangs?
Try the Wangs* and the Changs**!

*Oliver **Jeff

/thread

Oh dear, I'm starting to sound like Momus.

What, did Lester do that about the sixties like one time?

still, obviously, not read any lester bangs. still, obviously, have no plans to do so.

who was differentcritic upthread anyway?

A hot glue gun.
Silly string.
A salad shooter.
A catapult.
A slingshot.