"No I don't think it was a myth at all, anymore than what the recession that the whole country was experiencing was a myth, which obviously seems like it's going to get worse and worse"
About this Quote
Bangs is doing what he does best: turning a seemingly simple denial into an indictment of the people who need denial to keep their story clean. “No I don’t think it was a myth at all” isn’t just a corrective; it’s a refusal to let cultural gatekeepers file something messy under “legend” and move on. Myth is the soft-focus setting on history: it flatters the audience, cleans up causality, makes pain feel predetermined. Bangs yanks the lens back to documentary.
The comparison to the recession is the knife twist. He’s saying: you don’t get to call hardship imaginary just because it’s inconvenient, and you don’t get to downgrade a lived cultural catastrophe into “myth” because it complicates your nostalgia. By linking whatever “it” is (a scene, an artist’s collapse, an era’s rot) to an economic downturn “the whole country was experiencing,” he widens the blame. This isn’t just personal failure or isolated scandal; it’s structural. The culture produces casualties the way the economy does: predictably, repeatedly, with a shrugging “that’s just how it goes.”
His syntax matters. The sentence is long, crowded, a little busted up, like someone talking fast because they’ve heard the bad-faith version too many times and can’t stand another retelling. The final clause, “obviously seems like it’s going to get worse and worse,” lands as fatalism masquerading as clarity: the bleak confidence of someone watching institutions fail in real time. Bangs isn’t mythbusting for sport. He’s trying to keep the record honest while the room is still pretending not to see what’s happening.
The comparison to the recession is the knife twist. He’s saying: you don’t get to call hardship imaginary just because it’s inconvenient, and you don’t get to downgrade a lived cultural catastrophe into “myth” because it complicates your nostalgia. By linking whatever “it” is (a scene, an artist’s collapse, an era’s rot) to an economic downturn “the whole country was experiencing,” he widens the blame. This isn’t just personal failure or isolated scandal; it’s structural. The culture produces casualties the way the economy does: predictably, repeatedly, with a shrugging “that’s just how it goes.”
His syntax matters. The sentence is long, crowded, a little busted up, like someone talking fast because they’ve heard the bad-faith version too many times and can’t stand another retelling. The final clause, “obviously seems like it’s going to get worse and worse,” lands as fatalism masquerading as clarity: the bleak confidence of someone watching institutions fail in real time. Bangs isn’t mythbusting for sport. He’s trying to keep the record honest while the room is still pretending not to see what’s happening.
Quote Details
| Topic | Tough Times |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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