Gonna add the opening quote, because it is glorious:
You cannot make friends with the rock stars…if you’re going to be a true journalist, you know, a rock journalist. First, you never get paid much, but you will get free records from the record company.
[There’s] fuckin’ nothin’ about you that is controversial. God, it’s gonna get ugly. And they’re gonna buy you drinks, you’re gonna meet girls, they’re gonna try to fly you places for free, offer you drugs. I know, it sounds great, but these people are not your friends. You know, these are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of the rock stars and they will ruin rock ‘n’ roll and strangle everything we love about it.
Because they’re trying to buy respectability for a form that’s gloriously and righteously dumb.
Lester Bangs, Almost Famous (2000)
EDITED TO ADD: If you want a good companion piece to this, Devs and the Culture of Tech by @UnseriousAcademic is a damn good read, going deep into the cultural issues which leads to the fawning tech press Zitron so thoroughly tears into.
There is such unbelievable faith in men who have continually failed to live up to it — an indomitable belief that this much money couldn’t be wrong, and that the people running these companies are anything other than selfish opportunists that will say what they need to as a means of getting what they want, and that they got there not through a combination of privilege, luck and connections, but through some sort of superior intellect and guile.
this is one of the most enduring, widespread and astonishing tendencies I see in people: they need to believe that the famous, wealthy or powerful have positive qualities. they enjoy inhabiting this fantasy; often doing so is an activity, one that can lead into a parasocial connection.
trump and musk obviously benefit from this, but liberals watching the velvet glove of snl or a late night show stroke a celebrity indulge in the fantasy as well. many of the most highly regarded items of liberal media are of this type; see Sorkin’s career, or the ultimately lovable conservative dad figure of 30 rock.
to be honest, I thought Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency would root out this tendency in people, but I was very wrong. tens of millions of people watched this man bleat out his every thought all day on twitter, including almost the entire media class, and nearly none of them seem to have permanently learned what that said about the relationship between success and merit.
on a side note a lot of how I think about merit was built up by reading and rereading fooled by randomness as a teenager. I won’t endorse it because that was a long time ago and the author is a narcissist, but maybe other people have thoughts on it? I would love to hear some discussion of it
did Bangs actually say anything like this? Because rock critics tend to have a ton of rock star friends because record nerds gather, and Bangs was no exception
