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<\/a><\/p>\n\n \nIf you\u2019ve read it, then you know how powerful and sui generis<\/em> it is. People are still arguing about it, and these arguments just underline the obit\u2019s stature as a piece of critical commentary. The obituary feels like it’s going to derail into a gigantic PAN of the man – not as vicious as, say, Hunter Thompson’s obit for Nixon, or Christopher Hitchens’ obit for Mother Teresa – but it’s certainly not misty-water-colored-memories. In it, Bangs describes wandering around the Village, going into different stores looking for beer, asking people what they think of Elvis. But of course Bangs builds to something. It builds and builds and builds … The piece has a crescendo like you wouldn’t believe. It is one of the most well-known pieces of music writing in the canon – not to mention social\/cultural critique – of that era and ours. It is EERILY prescient about where the culture was going. <\/p>\n In the obituary, Bangs was also one of the only (if not the only) heterosexual male music critics who admitted that Elvis turned him on sexually. This is a huge “missing” in much of the contemporaneous commentary on Elvis, most of which was written by men. Of course the men refer to Elvis’ wiggling, his sexual persona, etc., but they remain distant from it. Lester Bangs goes right to the heart of it. <\/p>\n Everyone always references the final paragraph but I treasure this section: <\/p>\n \u201cHe was the only male performer I have ever seen to whom I responded sexually; it wasn\u2019t real arousal, rather an erection of the heart, when I looked at him I went mad with desire and envy and worship and self-projection. I mean, Mick Jagger, whom I saw as far back as 1964 and twice in \u201965, never even came close. There was Elvis, dressed up in this totally ridiculous white suit which looked like some studded Arthurian castle, and he was too fat, and the buckle on his belt was as big as your head except that your head is not made of solid gold, and any lesser man would have been the spittin\u2019 image of a Neil Diamond damfool in such a getup, but on Elvis it fit. What didn\u2019t? … <\/p>\n That night in Detroit, a night I will never forget, he had but to ever so slightly move one shoulder muscle, not even a shrug, and the girls in the gallery hit by its ray screamed, fainted, howled in heat. Literally, every time this man moved any part of his body the slightest centimeter, tens or tens of thousands of people went berserk. Not Sinatra, not Jagger, not the Beatles, nobody you can come up with ever elicited such hysteria among so many.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n A huge connection with our past is now severed. In their final announcement, they did say that they were working to keep the digital archives online. But that feels extremely precarious. This is why when people say “the Internet is forever” I say, “What internet are YOU talking about?” Stuff is lost all the time. Yeah, yeah, wayback machine, but please, the fact remains: when a site goes down, often all the writing goes down with it. We cannot lose these things. We cannot lose access to them! What do we have to replace the Village Voice<\/i>? <\/p>\n Don’t answer that. I already know.<\/p>\n To steal the famous last line of Bangs’ obit for Elvis: <\/p>\n So I won\u2019t say goodbye to the Village Voice<\/em>. I\u2019ll say goodbye to you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s a sad sad day. Not just for my friends who just got laid off, but for New York, for all of us. We are ALL the poorer when something like this happens. But to New Yorkers … to writers … Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n