Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [180]
While I still don’t wanna hear how everything is hunky-dory like a lot of those disco people and Barry Manilows are trying to sell us, I’m just completely fed up with cheap stupid nihilism especially when it starts acting trendy. I know society is sick and life is getting more complicated by the second, but if all you’ve got to say is get fucked life sucks you stink I stink who cares I’m bored whip me beat me kick me there's nothing else to do then I think you and everybody else would be a lot better off if you just kept your fucking mouth shut in the first place, not to mention your self-destructive habits to yourself instead of parading them around like The Red Badge of Courage or something. And this isn’t like If You Can’t Say Anything Nice Don’t Say Anything At All, it's more like … why restate what's been said and refuted already?
The trouble beyond all the sleaze and manipulation with the Pistols was that like a lot of other (most?) punkers they only went halfway: they did say everything sucks, which needed to be said even though it isn’t necessarily true, but they never took that next step of saying, “However, we have another idea over here….” They never even began to try to find out what valid non-copout alternatives there might be. Which actually is a lot harder than screaming random abuse and groveling and retching and fixing and mutilating yourself. But there are bands around who are searching, in highly intelligent and methodical ways, for those alternatives previously mentioned. They’re alternatives we all urgently need to explore, because the hour's getting late and outside things just keep getting uglier and uglier. I hope you will forgive me if I’ve gotten a little preachy or I hope not self-righteous herein; it's just that I and everybody else I know are fed up. We don’t want to discuss Sid Vicious or any of that shit ever again beyond the simple word, “No.” We think it's time for a change.
Written 1979
Published posthumously in Throat Culture #2, November 1990
from All My Friends
Are Hermits
Local workers, toilers mortar ‘n’ pestling out this new politic so selflessly it brought a tear to any eye, grubhawgs racking up 60, 80, 120, 180 hours per week with no pay just because THEY BELIEVED … these became the New American Heroes. Or rather prototypes of a whole new type of American. It grew like Topsy, quite naturally turnin’ the Feds every way but loose. “Uh, wha… ?” both Mr. Reagan and Mr. Carter were heard to respond in separate states that same campaign day, on being informed that a growing groundswell of the American public found not only them but the whole government irrelevant to immediate realities, it seemed America was starting over, rediscovering itself. The public was willing as ever to respond to Gallup and other polls even though everybody knew the polls were bought by one or another of the large political parties, General Foods, or whoever, every time. Americans turned on their TVs to hear the results of the latest surveys. Because the polls themselves had changed: sensing which side of the toast the average American family unit or citizen (single unit) was gonna slap his butter to this time, the polls opted for following public opinion, indicating to their more distant observers that soon now there might be no government left in America at all save whatever might issue up from a public preoccupied with local concerns of every sort. Somehow, while nobody was watching, decentralization had turned to complete fragmentation overnight. Nobody even bothered calling ‘em states anymore, and to say “I am an American …,” well, a joke's a joke but they do get stale especially when every drunk you meet thinks he just made it up. Reagan and Carter held a five-hour private meeting together in the East Wing of the White House, then issued a joint statement to what was left of the press, and, they hoped, to the nation: “Listen to us or the hostages in Iran will die. And don’t interrupt or we’ll send in the