Dancing About Architecture focusses on Lester Bangs, who was a famous rock critic, who is dead, who has had a biography written about him. Cue much flouncing and muttering about the parlous state of the rockcrit art (not from DAA, to their credit, though I’m not too sure Bangs would have liked Liz Phair). Bangs’ writing style is generally imitated now, his fiery and contradictory tastes sadly less so. (He’s written up as a kind of punk Godfather, but he spotted that Kraftwerk were important ten years before anyone else did, for just one example.)
DAA also review the new Lou Reed album, with much approving comment about how Lou is ‘raging against the dying of the light’, surely the #1 overused metaphor about ageing artists (sorry DAA!). I’m all for artists growing old disgracefully, but Dylan Thomas didn’t even get old, and all this raging stuff just smacks of youngsters projecting onto oldsters – where are the rock stars who can write about age with the bitter, curmudgeonly grace of, say, Larkin?