Out with a Bang(s)

Music is not all about musicians, as it happens. A big part of the industry involves guys (and girls) critiquing the work done by said musicians, however thankless that task may sometimes come to be. Nevertheless, they are essential to the art form, and they occasionally become part of it themselves...

In the beginning of Cameron Crowe’s cult classic film Almost Famous, we can see semi-autobiographical character William Miller meet with a Rolling Stone journalist who gives him the assignment to follow a band on tour, even though Miller is quite visibly a teenager whose life experience up to that point probably does not include the excess a touring rock band would inevitably entail. That journalist is played by none other than the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman, in one of the most on-point casting choices in the history of cinema. And the character Hoffman plays is… Lester Bangs.

Who is Lester Bangs, I hear you ask behind your screen? Well, quite obviously, a music critic. But that wouldn’t be fair to him or his genius: in short, he single-handedly revolutionized the way music journalists handled artists and their work, always ready to give a 100% genuine assessment of said work, whether or not the artist(s) would enjoy hearing it. In other words, Bangs, more than any other critic in his era and perhaps since, became recognized not merely for his writings, but for his very own persona. Basically, he became a rock star himself.

To enumerate his work, albeit done in rather short amount of time (more on that later), would be too arduous. Let us mention among other things his love for the experimentations of Velvet Underground leader and musical genius Lou Reed. The best example of that is Bangs’ incandescent review of Metal Machine Music, a double album made out entirely of saturated guitar sounds. Or the fact that he was among the first to coin the term Punk to describe what fellow genius Iggy Pop and his Stooges bandmates were creating at the time. Or the fact that he was also one of the first to celebrate Reggae music in the US, with a thunderous piece on Toots Hibberts‘ 1972 Funky Kingston album. Or that time he jumped on stage at a J. Geils band concert to write a review — live…

Ushering in a brand new approach to music journalism that in many ways foreshadowed the influence bloggers would later have on the industry, Bangs made a mark on music in a way very few critics ever did. His truly larger than life persona largely paralleling that of the artists he was writing about, he passed away from a drug overdose at the tender age of 33, leaving behind a legacy of absolute intellectual integrity and sheer musical intransigence. Here’s to hoping the next crop of music critics follows in the same footsteps…