Parenting & Family Quote by Lester Bangs

Bangs is dangling a small grenade: the “interesting thing” isn’t a new sound or a better band, it’s a rupture in who gets to be in the room. He frames it as an offhand thought, but the casual syntax is doing strategy. “I mean,” “I think,” “like” - he’s performing spontaneity while smuggling in a hard claim: rock’s social contract collapses the moment ticket prices turn a youth culture into a luxury product.

The England reference is a pressure point. In the early-to-mid ’70s, British rock shows were already sliding toward stadium scale and promoter control, and the resentment around pricing helped fertilize the conditions punk would later exploit: not just anger at the music, anger at the gatekeeping. Bangs, the great anti-mythmaker of rock criticism, is imagining class politics returning to a scene that sells itself as rebellion. If “all these kids” can’t afford entry, then the music’s meaning changes even if the songs don’t.

His tone is tellingly clinical: “interesting,” not “tragic.” That’s Bangs the critic, not the fan, leaning into contradiction. He’s fascinated by backlash as a cultural engine, by the way exclusion can spark new forms, new venues, new aesthetics, new spite. The subtext is a warning to rock’s grown-ups - the labels, the promoters, the bands chasing bigger gates: you can price out the kids, but you can’t price out their response. When the audience becomes a demographic filtered by income, the genre stops being a movement and starts being a product with a dress code.