Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lester Bangs was as eerily prophetic as his IRL counterpart when he said these words.
Let’s recap. The line crops up twice in the film. The first when Bangs is cautioning young William from becoming a rock writer, warning him that he’s made it just in time to witness the death of rock and roll (aka the commercialisation of subculture aka the creation of ‘the industry of cool’), just before commissioning him (William) to write him (Bangs) a thousand words on Black Sabbath. Given how the kid is so romantically oblivious to the possibility that there is anything else worth doing with one’s short life apart from writing about music, it’s easy for us to get sucked into our protagonist’s dream and to write off Bangs’ words as excessive and reactionary.
Which is why he needs to say them again later in the film for you to really hear him. William is on tour with Stillwater who are in the middle of a reluctant talk with a very convincing potential new band manager, while their existing manager looks on apathetically. This is in the wake of a series of tour-related mishaps all which could, according to New Manager, have been turned into a profit had they been better… managed. ‘We’re in it for the music!’ Russell’s attempt at staying authentic cannot stand up to the promise of profit and so, this time, when Bangs is on the phone with William and he says ‘The war is over, they won’ you feel him. In those five words you see sponsorship deals, record labels and ads in glossies. The Hit Machine materialises before your eyes and suddenly everyone’s recording in sleek wood-panelled studios instead of garages, basements, attics and bedrooms.
I think that the best records are made on garbage equipment and played on garbage equipment […] The Dolby’s, the studios and the whole surreality of the thing, it just takes all the mud and the guts out of it. I mean the music is supposed to be distorted in the first place, and the clearer you make it, the more you rob it.
That’s the REAL Lester Bangs predicting the demise of authenticity in music back in 1980. While we could still smell the sweat and taste the grit of rock and roll at least in the early 90s, we also saw ‘CORPORATE MAGAZINES STILL SUCK’ on Kurt Cobain’s t-shirt when Nirvana appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone just two or so decades after Stillwater did, all while assembly lines stamped his eyelinered face on mass-produced black t-shirts. The war was over, they’d won.
Maybe the days of grit and dirty glamour are definitively behind us. You’ll still find dirt in the backs of dingy indie venues, where the beer is cheap and rent not so much. But perhaps the closest we’ll get to glamour is Zachary Cole Smith’s admission that DIIV’s last album is the story of his own struggle with heroin.
Maybe it’s because, as the music video fades, and as bandcamp finds itself saturated with audio, we’re listening more and watching less.And maybe bombastic egoism and self-destructiveness are meaningless in the absence of an audience. What good are sexual escapades if there aren’t any hushed voices whispering stories of the depths of your debauchery? Why drop a tab if you haven’t an awed spectator to narrate your trip to after the comedown? We throw the words glamour, grit and guts at our stars, but we don’t have the time to label anything beyond the music we listen anymore. Maybe it’s not as romantic, but perhaps it’s the best we’ll ever have. Maybe this is the purest music has ever been.