"The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience"
About this Quote
Contempt is the critic's favorite perfume, and Lester Bangs knows it. That's what makes this line sting: it's a warning from someone professionally licensed to sneer. Bangs isn't preaching niceness; he's drawing a hard boundary between abrasive honesty and the cheap thrill of superiority. A performer can be sloppy, self-indulgent, even hostile onstage, but the moment the posture curdles into "you're beneath me", the act collapses. Not morally, aesthetically.
The word "ultimate" is doing blunt-force work. In rock, sins are plentiful and often celebrated: excess, ego, provocation, chaos. Bangs is saying all of that can be metabolized into energy as long as it keeps faith with the transaction. The audience isn't a focus group; they're co-authors of the night. Contempt breaks the circuit. It turns risk into punishment, rebellion into a tantrum, difficulty into gatekeeping. The performer stops playing toward an encounter and starts playing over people's heads, which is just another kind of selling out: not to commerce, but to self-regard.
The context is Bangs's whole career inside the love-hate machinery of 1970s rock, when authenticity became both religion and marketing copy. He watched artists get rewarded for postures of aloofness, cruelty, and irony, and he understood how easily "challenging the crowd" becomes a mask for laziness or fear. The line reads like a code of ethics for the stage, and also for criticism: you can be savage, but you can't be smug.
The word "ultimate" is doing blunt-force work. In rock, sins are plentiful and often celebrated: excess, ego, provocation, chaos. Bangs is saying all of that can be metabolized into energy as long as it keeps faith with the transaction. The audience isn't a focus group; they're co-authors of the night. Contempt breaks the circuit. It turns risk into punishment, rebellion into a tantrum, difficulty into gatekeeping. The performer stops playing toward an encounter and starts playing over people's heads, which is just another kind of selling out: not to commerce, but to self-regard.
The context is Bangs's whole career inside the love-hate machinery of 1970s rock, when authenticity became both religion and marketing copy. He watched artists get rewarded for postures of aloofness, cruelty, and irony, and he understood how easily "challenging the crowd" becomes a mask for laziness or fear. The line reads like a code of ethics for the stage, and also for criticism: you can be savage, but you can't be smug.
Quote Details
| Topic | Respect |
|---|
More Quotes by Lester
Add to List
