What if writing rock history was also writing with “ifs”? Or how Lester Bangs liked playing a trick on his reader’s perception of time

It is usually accepted that rock history is divided into cycles. However, from the beginning of his work, American rock critic Lester Bangs took a radically different look at the manner in which that history should be written. In his opinion, rock history did not necessarily have to be seen as an alternation between long periods of expectation and short heydays. It instead could be imagined as an eternal “rock dream” that would fulfill the wildest promises. To keep such a faith would however imply leaving the door open to temporary escapes in the hypothetical and the conditional. Bangs succeeded in doing so through the recurrent use of the conjunction “if” in his texts. This short term could effectively convince the reader with the most incredible histories. In other words—as a tour de force—not only did it allow a wide variety of time-distortions, but it also reoriented the reader’s attention from history to fiction. What if indeed, writing rock history was also writing with “ifs”? Bangs never ceased to raise this question with a lot of humor in his texts. And in the end, no matter how unbelievable that history of rock may have been sometimes, Bangs always was a cultural gatekeeper, a keeper of the flame. Even if he played a trick on his reader, he still made him believe in rock, and in that way as a critic carried out his mission, never failing to do his duty