"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"
About this Quote
Bangs doesn’t arrive with a thesis; he arrives mid-stumble, and that’s the point. “I’m really schizophrenic about that” is less a clinical claim than a deliberately messy admission of being split in two by the thing he’s trying to name: rock’s magnetism and its menace. He’s performing the critic’s central problem in real time - how do you praise an art form built on disorder without turning that disorder into a tasteful museum label?
The sentence is a tug-of-war between conscience and craving. “On the one hand” sets up a rational, adjudicating voice, but what spills out is not neat argument. It’s escalation: “inherently,” then “even violent,” then the rush of “wild and raw and all this.” That trailing “and all this” is Bangs’s signature dodge and flex: he knows the clichés, knows he’s flirting with them, and refuses to clean up the spillage because cleaning it up would betray the subject. Rock, in his framing, isn’t just sound; it’s appetite, risk, maybe harm - and the critic is implicated, enjoying what he’s supposed to evaluate.
Context matters: Bangs wrote at a time when rock was being absorbed by industry and mythmaking, when “authenticity” was already a marketing term. His hesitation reads like resistance to the easy story: that rawness is pure, that violence is edgy, that transgression automatically equals truth. He wants the charge without the sermon, and he wants you to feel how unstable that desire is.
The sentence is a tug-of-war between conscience and craving. “On the one hand” sets up a rational, adjudicating voice, but what spills out is not neat argument. It’s escalation: “inherently,” then “even violent,” then the rush of “wild and raw and all this.” That trailing “and all this” is Bangs’s signature dodge and flex: he knows the clichés, knows he’s flirting with them, and refuses to clean up the spillage because cleaning it up would betray the subject. Rock, in his framing, isn’t just sound; it’s appetite, risk, maybe harm - and the critic is implicated, enjoying what he’s supposed to evaluate.
Context matters: Bangs wrote at a time when rock was being absorbed by industry and mythmaking, when “authenticity” was already a marketing term. His hesitation reads like resistance to the easy story: that rawness is pure, that violence is edgy, that transgression automatically equals truth. He wants the charge without the sermon, and he wants you to feel how unstable that desire is.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|
More Quotes by Lester
Add to List
