Let Us Now Kill White Elephants

Sui generis critic and painter Manny Farber stated, “I can’t imagine a more perfect art form, a more perfect career than criticism.” Such a declaration must sound nuts if your points of reference pattern their careerism after such fast-growing fields as termite control, postmodern interior decorating (“This edgy Radiohead end table will perfectly complement your fabulous featherette Björk recliner”), and buzzword processing (every speck of expression forced though the finer-than-thou filters of a proper Esperanto machine). On the other hand (sporting half a Night of the Hunter tattoo), if you think of contentiously addictive voices from the past like the now-retired Farber or the late Lester Bangs, you may recall a time when such notions were self-evident. The fearless, heady, armor-piercing vernacular of “Carbonated Dyspepsia” or “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves,” “Hard Sell Cinema,” or “James Taylor Marked for Death” amounted to more than off-the-rack jobbery, gushing politesse, consumer guidance counseling. Each new piece was an adventure in thought, language, feeling, and sensibility: meeting art and life on equal terms, it was the kind of writing that opened up whole underground vistas of tough-minded possibility.

“He was a romantic in the gravest, saddest, best, and most ridiculous sense of that worn-out word.” So said Nick Tosches, no lightweight as a critic himself, eulogizing his friend and comrade Lester Bangs: romantic in a punk rock/Naked Lunch sense of the term, the kind who thought the only love worth having was one where all parties involved saw exactly what was on the end of every fork. He was the rock critic as simultaneous true believer and loyal apostate, someone who wanted to save rock ’n’ roll, Blank Generation youth, and the world at large from themselves. His rambunctiously free-associating first-person prose has spawned a host of Lesteroids over the last few decades (less recognized is the way his insistence on the intimately personal as the political helped pave the way for more assertive, irreverent female voices in rock criticism). But as with Pauline Kael, his followers have tended to latch onto the more obvious and narrow aspects of his style, centering around no-bullshit attitude and an amped-up canon embracing the guilt-free pleasures of “trash.” (Brian De Palma/Iggy and the Stooges serving as the standard-bearing yardsticks of their respective aesthetics, but instead of shaking up well-bred folks from within the venerable confines of The New Yorker, Bangs found his calling as writer and editor for Creem magazine—under his aegis, a cross between Hit Parader, The National Lampoon, and The Partisan Review if Susie Sontag had only been a glue-sniffing headbanger.)

Since his death in 1982 at age...