Would Lester Bang's like the Wu-Tang Clan?
tonyphrone
1,500 Posts
...or hip-hop for that matter? He died at the height of Punk - in which he was an early champion. But he also worshipped at the altar of James Brown and John Coltrane. Pick up "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung : The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock'N'Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock 'N'Roll" if you get a chance! 
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Honestly Wu Tang are hardly controversial figures in the crit community, check out how much overheated praise Ghost's last album got.
An old friend of mine from my zine days wrote the Bangs bio (It's a good read too)...
I really enjoyed that book
His name's Jim DeRogatis. I think he has a book coming out about the Flaming Lips...
I wouldn't trust his opinion on rap, any more than I'd expect anyone to trust mine (I like it, but I can't say I know a lot about it...), but he knows his rock'n'roll, has a good sense of humor, and is an excellent writer.
i'll pick up both books!
your sexy persuasive ta-ta's and thighs
catch my eyes like highs I want your bodily surprise
your wasteline, bangin like a bassline
physical form is well complexed
and yo, I love your outline, Boo
your whole body is wild, wit your rugged profile
enough to make a hard rock smile
mad respect with the fat thighs
my guess is that he would agree with wu tang on some things.
Strangely enuff, I'm about to return this second Bangs anthology to the library today! Was rereading that hilarious Jamaican piece last night. The part where Bangs and two other journalists are sitting in Bob Marley's backyard interviewing him is a scream. Extra props to Bangs who thought Marley was far overrated as early as 1976.
Rare groove fans may want to go to the library and track down the issue of Rolling Stone from late '69 (Miles Davis on cover), where Bangs reviews the latest albums by the Bar-Kays and the Watts 103rd St. Rhythm Band. He thinks the Bar-Kays album is mediocre and praises the Watts Band for taking chances that the average black artist wouldn't dream of back then (remember, funk was still fairly new and the debut albums by Curtis Mayfield, Funkadelic, Swamp Dogg, etc. were still a year away, so R&B wasn't quite "progressive" yet). His views on the state of black music vs. their white hippie counterparts are on the money.
picked up an odd-looking classical LP named "Beethoven's Head"
in a thrift store...despite being a standard collection of
Beethoven compositions, it included full-cover liner notes by
Lester Bangs on the back! Really funny stuff, too, in his
usual style. I know it's part of a series, although I don't
know if he did the liners for all of them or if they used
other writers as well. Check for 'em - I'm sure
they rarely cost more than the half-buck I paid...
Man, LB is the Father to the Soul Strut style!
When heads talk about music melting their face, and private
press folk LP's causing them to shit blood, that's ground
that Lester paved right there
Derogatis might possibly be the single most disliked music critic in America. I don't know a single colleague of his that'd roll for him.
they used other writers. i think they may have all been rock critics - the point of the series was to turn on the rock audience to classical music, so naturally they drafted lester bangs and ed ward (the only other annotator i know for that series) to talk about the music from a rock perspective
except that lester bangs hated MAJOR-LABEL folk albums, never mind private press!