Top 35 Lester Bangs Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.”

— Lester Bangs

2. “Music, you know, true music not just rock ‘n’ roll, chooses you.”

— Lester Bangs

3. “Rock ‘n’ roll is an attitude, it’s not a musical form of a strict sort. It’s a way of doing things, of approaching things. Writing can be rock ‘n’ roll, or a movie can be rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a way of living your life.”

— Lester Bangs

4. “I can guarantee you one thing, we will never agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis.”

— Lester Bangs

5. “Style is originality; fashion is fascism. The two are eternally and unalterably opposed.”

— Lester Bangs

6. “Nothing ever quite dies, it just comes back in a different form.”

— Lester Bangs

7. “Sometimes I think nothing is simple but the feeling of pain.”

— Lester Bangs

8. “I’ve always believed the New Left is rank.”

— Lester Bangs

9. “The great thing about The Clash of course is that they keep searching for answers beyond that.”

— Lester Bangs

10. “The Mekons are the most revolutionary group in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.”

— Lester Bangs

11. “The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.”

— Lester Bangs

12. “I mean Iggy and The Stooges first couple of albums I think sold twenty five thousand between the two of them you know and so to talk in terms of an underground I mean you have to go really to the independent labels and things like that.”

— Lester Bangs

13. “The whole point of American culture is to pick up any old piece of trash and make it shine with more facets than the Hope Diamond.”

— Lester Bangs

14. “A hero is a goddam stupid thing to have in the first place and a general block to anything you might wanta accomplish on your own.”

— Lester Bangs

15. “They wouldn’t be heroes if they were infallible, in fact they wouldn’t be heroes if they weren’t miserable wretched dogs, the pariahs of the earth, besides which the only reason to build up an idol is to tear it down again.”

— Lester Bangs

16. “Sexual chaos reigns currently, but out of chaos may flow true understanding and harmony, and either way Elvis almost singlehandedly opened the floodgates.”

— Lester Bangs

17. “The only questions worth asking today are whether humans are going to have any emotions tomorrow, and what the quality of life will be if the answer is no.”

— Lester Bangs

18. “All blues singers are great liars.”

— Lester Bangs

19. “Realizing that life is precious the natural tendency is to trample on it, like laughing at a funeral.”

— Lester Bangs

20. “If there’s nothing more poisonous than bigotry, there’s nothing more pathetic than liberal guilt.”

— Lester Bangs

21. “The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience.”

— Lester Bangs

22. “The real question is what to live for. And I can’t answer it. Except another one of your records. And another chance for me to write. Art for art’s sake, corny as that sounds.”

— Lester Bangs

23. “I think that if most guys in America could somehow get their fave-rave poster girl in bed and have total license to do whatever they wanted with this legendary body for one afternoon, at least 75 percent of the guys in the country would elect to beat her up.”

— Lester Bangs

24. “The thing is that, they all had real strong personalities and real distinct identities, and I don’t find most of the groups that are coming out now really do.”

— Lester Bangs

Featured in: Strong Quotes

25. “John Lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once you’ve made your mark on history those who can’t will be so grateful they’ll turn it into a cage for you.”

— Lester Bangs

26. “I’m not saying that all college students are subhuman – I’m just saying that if you aim to spend a few years mastering the art of pomposity, these are places where you can be taught by undisputed experts.”

— Lester Bangs

27. “Don’t ask me why I obsessively look to rock ’n’ roll bands for some kind of model for a better society. I guess it’s just that I glimpsed something beautiful in a flashbulb moment once, and perhaps mistaking it for prophecy have been seeking its fulfillment ever since.”

— Lester Bangs

28. “I mean the interesting thing I think would be if something happened like, what happened in England where all these kids that all of a sudden can’t afford the ticket prices.”

— Lester Bangs

29. “Irving Berlin said, “Popular music is popular because a lot of people like it.” That doesn’t mean it’s good or bad – that’s the equivalent of arguing the merits of hotdogs versus hamburgers. What the hell difference does it make?”

— Lester Bangs

30. “The extravagant and ostentatious lifestyles that pass for charisma in a time when almost anybody talks about charisma but if you think about it there’s precious little to be seen.”

— Lester Bangs

31. “I don’t see that there are any particular changes in popular music.”

— Lester Bangs

32. “Rock is for everybody; it should be so implicitly anti-elitist that the question of whether somebody’s qualified to perform it should never even arise.”

— Lester Bangs

33. “In fact I think now we’ve reached a point now, where the powers that be really have sort of vested interest in all of us being stoned out as much as possible all the time so we don’t know what’s going on, and we don’t care.”

— Lester Bangs

34. “All the proliferating falsifications of what I and everyone I know experienced once in what it is now so convenient to call the “fifties” or “sixties,” as if life was really measured or lived in arbitrary decades, when the history books are sold like comix.”

— Lester Bangs

35. “I’m really schizophrenic about that, because on the one hand I would say, yes there is, there’s something inherently, even violent about it, it’s wild and raw and all this.”

— Lester Bangs

36. “I mean it’s easier to be in a demonstration if it’s a trip that’s one of the reasons why the whole thing fell apart in 1971, because it wasn’t a trip any longer.”

— Lester Bangs

37. “Like almost all of Beefheart’s recorded work, it was not even “ahead” of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one.”

— Lester Bangs

38. “As far as a truly radical conscience, you have to take it as part of a larger thing, that it was sort of historical inevitability that with the coming of a leaguer society people would start to use drugs a lot more then they had before.”

— Lester Bangs