Daily Inspiration Quote by Lester Bangs

Bangs is smuggling a moral argument into the middle of an aesthetic pep talk, then wincing as he does it. The line starts with the familiar rock-romance of self-reinvention: recreate yourself, make something original, creative, artistic. Then it tilts. He adds "maybe even decent", and immediately hedges: "or moral if I can use words like that". That flinch matters. In Bangs's world, "moral" is a suspect term, the kind of piety critics get mocked for and artists evade with irony. He wants to believe in goodness without sounding like a hall monitor.

The specific intent is to reclaim criticism (and art-making by proxy) as more than taste-making or scene-policing. Bangs is arguing that the act of making - and of committing to a sensibility - can be a form of self-construction with ethical stakes. Not ethics as sermon, but ethics as residue: what you choose to celebrate, what you refuse to excuse, what kind of person your aesthetic habits are training you to be.

Subtext: the counterculture's great disappointment. By the 1970s, authenticity had become a brand, transgression a routine, and "artistic" could be a blanket alibi for selfishness. Bangs keeps the punk/rock suspicion of sanctimony, yet he also suspects that pure nihilism is just another pose. His repetition ("original and creative and artistic") mimics thee hype machine; his qualifiers ("maybe", "if I can use words like that") puncture it. The payoff is the plainspoken pivot to "basically good" - a modest phrase for an immodest claim: art can be a way back to decency when the culture's cool is running out.