Some excerpts from my aborted notes to Mark Sinker’s epic “noise” essay (themselves a bastardization of an aborted essay on Lester Bangs/Richard Meltzer [just be thankful I left out the two paragraphs comparing Steve Albini to Dean Martin]):
I will be the first to admit that I think Unca Les has been given a raw deal in recent years (especially on ILM), but also agree that as the defining model for what a rock critic ‘should be’ (a bit like the Beatles that one — and yes, I’m avoiding the I-word for you) he leaves a lot to be desired. Hardly anyone apes him directly, but all who decide to write about music must feel his clammy, Romilar soaked hand on their shoulder. As for his ‘direct’ successors — the Byron Coley/Forced Exposure/American hardcore/Conflict axis — they chose to imitate his most obvious stylistic tropes and traits (casual misanthropy, over-amped hyperbole, ‘free spleen’ venting) while lacking the intense (if not always strident or rigorous) self-examination.
I say that to say this: DIE YOU JARHEAD ASSHOLE MOTHERFUCKERS, YOU CLOTS IN THE HUMAN SYSTEM, YOU FESTERING TUMOROUS BOILS ON SOCIETY, YOU PIGFUCKERS IN 200 DOLLAR SUITS AND CLUTCHING ACCOUNTANTS DEGREES, YOU WC FIELDS ACTING PRICKS, YOU ‘OH, I SAID FAG OR MADE A JOKE ABOUT RAPE, TEE HEE!’ FOOLS, YOUR OWN RIGOROUS CONTEMPT FOR EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE DISGUISING YOUR DEEP AND POSIONOUS SELF-LOATHING, YOUR ‘FREEDOM’ FROM CANT IS NOTHING BUT PISS-POOR PSYCHIC ARMOR, I’D TAKE THE WORST KIND OF HIPPIES TIL THE END OF TIME OVER YOUR CHEAP-JACK NIHILISM SUPPOSEDLY SUPPORTING A HUMANISM WHICH COULD NEVER BE THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE’DIE, DIE, DIE!!
Phew. Sorry, didn’t mean to go off on a rant there. But nothing gets my goat more than the bi(semi)otic stink of locker room machismo disguised as anti-PC/post-intellectual tomfoolery, except maybe the times when I still feel it inside myself (a good portion of why I stopped posting to ILX truth be told.) Bangs had it too of course, Meltzer, Tosches perhaps more than either except it manifested itself in a more effete/esthete loci of ‘traditional’ chauvinism. The difference between Bangs racism/sexism/homophobia and his peers & children’s is not that he (publicly) recanted, but that, even when it was as mannered as the olde Englishe, it felt true. Which made that eventual refutation all the more powerful (and his death all the more bitter) all the more powerful: a self-realization which might lead to *self-love*. (And not in the ‘now I woke up and jerked off three times’ Meltzerian sense either.)
But you know what? Maybe I did mean to go off on a rant.. I don’t mean to get all B*n W*tson here, but these guys have defined the ‘noise’ discourse for the last 20 years. And they’re granted — through their middle-class get out of jail cards, their elastic educational clauses — all of their worst possible excesses. Is it right to blame Lester? Maybe. Things might have been quite different if he had lived, dried out, and started writing from a perspective other than a thin coil of self-hate snaking through his guts. What uses would a newly freed Lester have found for all that horrible noise?