The infamous and almost comically bitter feud between Lester Bangs and Lou Reed remains one of rock criticism's most entertaining soap operas, endlessly dissected by readers and critics with a taste for the dramatic. I have to tip my hat—perhaps with some eye-rolling—to Greil Marcus for including Bangs's over-the-top, detail-obsessed account of their ongoing squabbles and ego clashes in Psychotic Reactions , a collection that gives us front-row seats to the freak show of personalities and philosophies behind the music. Bangs was practically in love with the existential, dead-end fatalism that the Velvet Underground and the Stooges turned into their own brand of musical misery—songs oozing with hopelessness and emotional wreckage. He was convinced that nothing in adult life ever rivaled the pure, unfiltered agony of a teenage boy drowning in his own overblown, melodramatic emotions, feelings so tangled and extreme that the only logical conclusion was an operatic eruption of rage and angst. Because, apparently, nobody feels feelings like a teenage boy with a guitar and a grudge.
In his writing,
Bangs often soared to moments of genuine poetry and insight while decoding the
music that spilled out from the ignored corners of urban and suburban sprawl.
Still, for all his eloquence, he conveniently sidestepped the messier question
of what actually happened when all those glorified emotions spilled over into
real-world violence—whether it was self-inflicted or aimed at the nearest
unlucky bystander. Back then, everyone seemed content to shine a spotlight on
these feelings and call it a day, as if exposing them was a public service. But
Bangs, being the endlessly restless self-examiner he was, couldn’t leave it
there. As he got older, he started poking holes in his own fanboy worship of
obviously damaged artists and began to question the entire cultural urge to
prop these people up as icons—never mind that, in reality, their “genius”
usually meant being a cautionary tale in a world supposedly trying to stay
decent and humane.
These waves of
second thoughts—followed by third, fourth, and probably fifth
thoughts—inevitably seeped into his run-ins with Lou Reed. Reed, who inspired
more ink than most monarchs, was, in Bangs's acerbic estimation, the ultimate
aesthete: a walking, talking relic of the old decadent scene. Bangs, with his
signature blend of admiration and exasperation, watched Reed fall headfirst
into the myth of “Lou Reed,” apparently so entranced by his own legend that he
couldn't resist hamming it up for the crowd. The result? Reed came off as ever
more decadent, self-absorbed, and all too happy to spoon-feed his fans exactly
what they expected, simply because their appetite for his myth knew no bounds.
From start to
finish, Bangs was on a never-ending quest for “authenticity” in both music and
motive. Eventually, however, he got a little queasy over the growing notion
that the ultimate artistic statement was to go full-throttle into oblivion—to
die for art, because, apparently, nothing says “commitment” like
self-destruction. Bangs, to his credit, finally decided this trope was a load
of nonsense, and started calling out the cultural obsession—embodied by the
likes of Sylvia Plath and John Berryman—with lionizing the artist who flames
out spectacularly. This newfound skepticism arrived just as Reed, ever
committed to the bit, seemed to be doubling down on the whole tragic artist
routine—the philosophy that art justifies any cost, and the artist’s misery (or
even demise) is some kind of noble, necessary sacrifice. As if the world needed
one more reason to light a candle for tortured souls with guitars.
