Synopsis
Compiled by Greil Marcus, his onetime editor at Rolling Stone, this anthology of articles, reviews, sketches, rants, and pure provocation is part of the literary legacy of legendary rock critic Lester Bangs. As Marcus points out in his introduction, PSYCHOTIC REACTIONS AND CARBURETOR DUNG is not a document of Bangs's writing so much as an attempt to set down what his writing was about, which was rock & roll and his own visceral response to it. PSYCHOTIC REACTIONS contains pieces from Bangs's early-1970s days at Creem magazine--a publication he assisted in molding into a scathing counterblast against the commercialism and hypocrisy of the music industry--as well as from New York's Village Voice and the British New Musical Express. However, there's not much here about bands that he liked: as Marcus notes, the more Bangs respected an artist, the more poorly he wrote. Which is why the white-hot rhetoric of pieces like "James Taylor Marked for Death," mostly a hymn of praise to Neanderthal '60s British pop group the Troggs, is framed as a diatribe against the aforementioned singer-songwriter, and why the hilariously titled "Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves," part of the chronicle of Bangs' ongoing vendetta with a more mercurial singer-songwriter, Lou Reed, makes such compulsive reading.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1988-10-01 | | Editor: | Greil Marcus | | Edition Description: | Reprint |
| Size | | Length: | 386 pages | | Height: | 8.0 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 0.5 in | | Weight: | 12.0 oz |
Publisher's Note
Vintage presents the paperback edition of the wild and brilliant writings of Lester Bangs--the most outrageous and popular rock critic of the 1970s--edited and with an introduction by the reigning dean of rack critics, Greil Marcus. Advertising in Rolling Stone and other major publications.
Industry Reviews
"Ecstasy is rare in music critics, which is why Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung makes such an impact....Unafraid of investing his sentences with the distortion of a punk guitarist, Bangs makes other rock journalism sound like a set of Ikea instructions."
(08/20/2009)
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