Rock'n'roll is an attitude, it's not a musical form of a strict sort. It's way of doing things, of approaching things. Writing can be rock'n'roll, or a movie can be rock'n'roll. It's a way of living your life.
Interpretation
Rock'n'roll represents a mindset and lifestyle rather than just a music genre.
In this quote, Lester Bangs expresses that rock'n'roll transcends its traditional definition as a musical genre; instead, it embodies an attitude and an approach to life. By emphasizing that writing, filmmaking, and daily living can all encompass the spirit of rock'n'roll, Bangs invites us to understand it as a broader philosophy that champions creativity, authenticity, and a non-conformist approach to existence.
In practice
In a discussion about artistic expression, one might say, 'Remember, rock'n'roll is an attitude; it's all about how we approach creativity.'
Look at it this way: There are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100 percent, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation.
Don’t ask me why I obsessively look to rock ’n’ roll bands for some kind of model for a better society. I guess it’s just that I glimpsed something beautiful in a flashbulb moment once, and perhaps mistaking it for prophecy have been seeking its fulfillment ever since.
Style is originality; fashion is fascism. The two are eternally and unalterably opposed.
Math and music are intimately related. Not necessarily on a conscious level, but sure.
If your educe sculpture to the flat plane of the temporal experience of the work. (...) the experience of the work is inseparable from the place in which the work resides. Apart from that condition, any experience of the work is a deception.
You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.
As a director, I design every movie to be true to itself, and damn it if they like it, and damn it if they don't.
Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter. Art is an organ of human life, transmitting man's reasonable perception into feeling.
There is nothing settled about a poet's identity. The becoming doesn't stop because the being has been achieved. They proceed together, attached in ways that are hard to be exact about.
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