Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [153]
No? Well that's what I thought, in fact that's why I’m doing it, because I want to make you all terminally self-conscious or at least irritated. It's not so much that I’m prejudiced against the younger generation for not appreciating the subtleties of the Seeds as opposed to the Buzzcocks—it's that I didn’t know there was a younger generation. I read this article in Newsweek which quoted me to the effect that punk was here to stay and since I didn’t remember giving any such quote or anything else for that matter I figured now's the time to cash in on my typical rock critic's oppressively musty store of useless cranial trivia so you’ll all know that nothing you’re doing is new whatsoever so you’ll all get demoralized and forget about it and we can go back to Jackson Browne wanking his tears. I am not a punk and never was (too literate, besides no jazz fan can be a punk), but I gained a certain amount of notoriety exploiting the phenom before Newsweek knew there was one so here I am beating a dead horse, of which one advantage you certainly can say is that it's not going to resist. Besides which I’m a dilettante and want to come on like a punk so I can be respected by the publisher of New Stiletto Bund Gazette and other similar fine publications, so the punkiest thing I can think of to do is put down everything going now by comparing it disfavorably to shit that happened a decade or more ago. I admit it's childish, but like I said it's hard to be deviant these days—just think of it as like buying a brand-new black leather jacket and going out of your way never to put a single crease in it.
All right, that's enough of that, this article is getting slack. Time to tighten up. Lessee, how can I accomplish such a feat. Archie Bell and the Drells are in Philadelphia and incommunicado since all the disco-matzos realized they could stop dancing with impunity, so I’m going to have to think of something imaginative. How about this: “It is the phantom spirit of an amphetamine age, gushing forth his geysers of grotesque gargoylerie upon the hapless heads of a public so numb they can scarcely respond with a piteous terminal twitching….” That was written by Marvin H. Hohman, Jr., in an article entitled “Purging the Zombatized Void with Alice Cooper,” in the summer 1970 issue of Creem. It was the first article ever published anywhere about Alice, and his first magazine cover. Marvin obviously had a vision; now he reviews jizrackjob fusions for Downbeat. Sic transit. And sic transit punk (and magazines as well), eh amigos? Let's take for instance the Shadows of Knight: did you know that one of them was once caught in a motel room in Chicago in flagrante delecto with either Question Mark or one of his Mysterians? And this in 1966 yet! Obviously proof of Iggy's contention that those boys were ahead of their time. Unlike, say… shit, I was gonna pick the biggest hip/u’ground name right now and nick some cranny of slipup from their genius to slander ‘em, but was stopped by the fact there is no name out now worthy of that. Everybody knows Patti's problems, Bruce Springsteen's been unemployed, Bowie's not worth mentioning except his white on white hair and face ensemble looks like a test pattern without the test, Iggy I can’t say anything bad about because I’m giving him one more album before I dump ten tons of slag on his puny pretensions, I mean who's left? I suppose you really wanna talk about punk rock. Okay, you tell me what punk rock is—in this space:
See, I told you so. Oh, but I’ll show you the roots of punk. The roots of punk was the first time a kid ended up living with his parents till he was 40. The roots of punk was the first time you stole money out of your mother's purse and didn’t know what to spend it on because you weren