"Critics are people you love to hate," agreed the late, legendary Lester Bangs. They’re jerks and pompous assholes, he pronounced in his infamous essay "How to Be a Rock Critic," a multiple-choice, fill-in the blanks guide. Regarded as the greatest writer in rock history, and probably its most vitriolic, Bangs is often credited with catapulting music journalism into literature. He declared that everyone possessed the credentials to be a rock critic, but although he mentored many and inspired legions, none touch his notoriety or match his flair to entertain, involve and engage readers.

When I worked with Lester during the early years of Creem magazine, I took exception to his bombast and bluster, cheap shots, snide retorts, reliance on epithets and diabolical ways. All the editors also lived together, so the 24/7 camaraderie created plenty of fallout. Yet Lester’s hysterical wit, goofy good nature, flash and flair brought ballast to the household and office. (Yeah, his room was a chaotic sty — but he did actually do the dishes.) I witnessed those all-night binges to reach a deadline, typing furiously to keep up with his thoughts and substances, to drown out the inner anguish. Our tastes diverged and I wasn’t a huge fan of his writing. Today, 21 years after his death, I read it now with new eyes.

Running the gamut from outrageous to brooding, his one-liners and treatises spared no one: Mick Jagger was a washout, Stevie Nicks a narcissist, Chrissie Hynde small potatoes, Ozzy Osbourne a moralist and Patti Smith a banshee. His pantheon of heroes, ranging from Miles Davis to the Sex Pistols, were ruthlessly skewered when they slipped (in his estimation). Bangs believed artists should take what came without whining, and he accepted a dose of his own medicine when it came time to edit his work for publication.

With "Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader," the new and long overdue collection of Lester’s work, I’ve become reacquainted with my former colleague and roommate from the distance of a less-than-perfect memory of his infectious grin and maddening opinions. Always curious how musicians reacted to his scathing coverage, I wondered if time healed wounds and wanted to offer them a chance to respond, to provide perspective to Bangs’ notorious hubris — if they weren’t still livid about it.

In the introduction to the anthology, editor and friend John Morthland explains how Bangs could turn from dumping to defending a record with equal credibility. His first published review in Rolling Stone in 1969 (reprinted in the book) slammed the MC5′s now-legendary "Kick Out the Jams" as a ridiculous, overbearing, pretentious album. He ranked the 5 with the Troggs as crude, raw, ugly noise — which would later become the very criteria he used to define the virtues of punk.

MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer felt Bangs was merciless in dismantling the band, like the new gunslinger in town taking on the baddest dude. "I believed we were the second coming of rock ‘n’ roll, messengers of music genius," Kramer acknowledges in an interview. "But in that instant, my entire ego collapsed. All my greatest fears were realized."

Lester felt some remorse after Elektra Records dropped the MC5. He became the band’s biggest fan, counting the album as an all-time classic. "He was so disarming in his apologies and his repudiation was so sincere," says Kramer. "I grew to like him. He forced us to confront our weaknesses."

Bangs used music as a vehicle to write about all kinds of stuff, always talking about it in terms of the bigger picture, says Morthland. He wrote about acts like Emerson, Lake & Palmer that other reviewers couldn’t be bothered with, placing them in a musical-historical context that included the Moog synthesizer, Charles Mingus, Mussorgsky, Mozart and Liberace.

"Anne Murray is the real thing," Bangs wrote in Creem. He glowed on about the mellow Canadian country-pop singer’s hypnotic honeyed vocals, and the enduring significance of her songs. Some may scoff at this, he suggested, but 30 years later, he’s fairly convincing, amusing — and lascivious. This from the writer who lionized Black Sabbath and derived inspiration from William S. Burroughs. Murray called him up to thank him at the time, which thrilled the besotted Bangs, though he suspected her label had set it up.

"I’m grateful to Lester," Murray says today. "He gave me his seal of approval, which came from a place where most people would not expect it."

All you could do was tease Lester and use him, says punk pioneer Richard Hell. Bangs regarded Hell as a philosopher poet, as well as a nihilist and defeatist. Although Hell says he’s seeking no revenge against critics who savaged him, he raked Bangs over the coals in a recent Village Voice testimonial, calling him a babbling buffoon and an obscene provocateur, but also admiring him for figuring out what really mattered.

When idols didn’t meet Bangs’ expectations, he could be ruthless. Miles Davis, he felt, became a worthless wretch, the Pistols turned into amoral bullies, and Lou Reed, one of his most beloved artists, was a professional zombie. Whether he was holding up high standards or was just plain high, Bangs threw down the gauntlet. He taunted artists, daring them to reach transcendence, say something important.

Composer Arnold Schoenberg alleged critics would shoot the wounded on the battlefield, but Bangs believed all was fair in love and war. When Lester interviewed Lou Reed, their verbal slugfests grew into goading sessions, fueled by massive amounts of booze and their equally massive egos. Bangs tested his icons and left bruises. Rock journalist Jaan Uhelszki, whom Lester championed back at Creem, broached the subject recently with Lou.

Reed replied, "Lester loved me so much he had to attack me every day. You know, it was so weird, because it’s not like I didn’t have my own problems. So that was some kind of weird — that somebody liked you so much that he just frothed at the mouth and tried to bite you."

Though Bangs rode Reed and his music like a roller coaster, he really did listen to Reed’s almost unlistenable "Metal Machine Music" until his death, and not for some roundabout, backhanded, half-ironic reason like "It’s so obnoxious and empties out a room," notes Morthland. Despite the trail of destruction, Bangs’ fanaticism with Reed strove to restore the exalted moment when music changed his life, when the Velvet Underground seared his soul, Patti Smith swept his breath away, the Rolling Stones still mattered and Miles "exposed me to my own cowardice in the face of dread or staved-off pain."

In calling Reed a bibulous bozo or Jim Morrison a bozo Dionysus, Lester was really talking about himself. As he once wrote, it’s "not really necessary to separate the clown from the poet." In passage after passage, whether extolling or plundering, he seemed to be examining his own foolish excesses as well as his imaginative originality. "The palooka with irony is also the nicest guy in town and man enough to show it," he once wrote of David Johansen. "It’s no longer enough to be a hostile ugly yowling asshole," he said of the Dead Kennedys. He accused Miles Davis, in his electronic period, of producing"half-thawed cryogenic doodles."

The tough inquisitor sometimes seemed too gleeful about lopping off heads. But his reason for shredding records was to seek the source of the cancer running through them, "praying for a cure." Bangs wouldn’t allow artists to phone in performances. He’d cite an entire catalog of albums and songs to prove his point, to hold them to higher standards. Lester insisted that his book about Blondie be unauthorized, reasoning that getting too buddy-buddy with the band would make him a recruit to the cause, whereas a lack of cooperation allowed objectivity.

Band members didn’t necessarily agree. “His idea of not doing a fluff piece was being a bitch,” says Chris Stein of Blondie. “We were doing a book at the same time, ‘Making Tracks,’ and so he got cranky about it.” Stein describes a series of photos in the band’s book of Lester carrying singer Debbie Harry on the beach with his hand groping her ass and his tongue hanging out. “I just think every picture is worth a thousand words,” Stein says. “He criticized her for using her sexuality while lusting after her at the same time. All I can say about Lester’s comments on us is that I wish he were around to see Britney Spears.”

Commenting about the hypocrisy of “boy critics and the male rock ‘n’ roll establishment,” Stein adds, “I think there was a lot of buried agenda Lester wasn’t even aware of himself. And I don’t know how much he believed all the stuff he was writing. I think he was just trying to stir up shit.”

Questioning Blondie’s steely demeanor, Bangs wrote: "The main reason we listen to music is to hear passion expressed. What does it say about us to dote on emotionally neutral art?"

When Bangs began performing with his own band, Stein recalls, his response was different. “Lester came up to Debbie after a show saying, ‘Oh God, I didn’t know how hard it was.’”

Bangs informed the Mekons, then a fledgling English punk band, that their music was swill. "We acknowledged it as a pretty accurate description," says guitarist Jon Langford. Impressed with the response, Bangs owned up to the send-up, and volunteered to write liner notes for the next album. He made superlative proclamations, calling the Mekons "the most revolutionary band in rock ‘n’ roll" and "better than the Beatles." Then Bangs added that, in fact, he’d never heard the album "and I never will." He never did, says Langford.

After cutting some drunken venom about Virgin Records, the British music magazine NME and erstwhile heroes like Brian Eno and John Lydon, Bangs’ stamp of approval garnered attention, and the band reconsidered its decision to break up. (As alt-rock veterans know, the Mekons are still together today.) "Lester ruined my chances at a straight life," Langford laughs.

Bangsian spew is an acquired taste. It’s not always worth slogging through 40,000 words on the Troggs. But the appeal of Lester’s prose doesn’t just stem from its gonzo style. Sometimes it’s jazz improv or anthemic rhythmic beating or Wagnerian noise. Consider his characteristic trashing of Canned Heat as "nondescript clinkletybonk tibia-rattling in pursuit of yeehah countryisms," which got him banned from Rolling Stone magazine.

"He seemed like a frustrated songwriter," notes Robby Krieger of the Doors, not an uncommon complaint about critics. Rereading Bangs’ piece on the Doors’ swelling popularity a decade after Jim Morrison’s death, Krieger chuckles, since another two decades later he’s touring Doors repertoire with keyboardist Ray Manzarek. Reflecting on the line, "[It's] going to set rock ‘n’ roll standards for a long time to come," Krieger sighs: "How prophetic."

Krieger says he liked Bangs’ writing, and offers faint praise: "I think he thought his articles were more sophisticated than anything he was writing about." But he takes exception to a remark about the Doors song "The End" being a joke. "Jim was funny as hell, but not with the music," he says. “That he took seriously. It was some of Jim’s most introspective writing." For Lester to call Jim Morrison a buffoon, he suggests, betrayed a lack of perspective on himself.

Asserting that artists wouldn’t be heroes if they were infallible, Bangs showed his own demons publicly. His songs with his band Birdland voice the vulnerability that mitigated the wisecracker’s pontification. Bangs’ writing, says John Morthland, "was always about him, the music and his relationship to that world. They weren’t separate things." At the time of his death, Lester was in transition, Morthland suggests, seeking something with as much meaning as music.

The last time I saw Lester I suggested he quit rock ‘n’ roll to write the Great American Novel. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” he answered. Some of his fiction is featured in the anthology, giving a clue as to what lurked within.

The various portraits of Bangs span from the kind, quirky rock guru in Cameron Crowe’s film "Almost Famous" to the self-indulgent, pained poet of Jim DeRogatis’ biography "Let It Blurt" and the impossible genius in the 1987 anthology "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung," edited by Greil Marcus. The Bangs enigma can’t reconcile his complexity — the ridiculous romantic and earnest friend with the unruly belligerent, the irrepressible innocent with the idealistic visionary.

Beyond the inexhaustible adjectives, Lester’s writing speaks volumes. I’m relieved, after all these years, to read writing that’s "like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head." Grateful it’s around for others to discover, I’m amazed by Lester’s mercurial mind and potent insights, startled by the immediacy, clarity and substance of the prose. To be reminded how it’s done. Mind you, it’s still true that small doses go a long way. It’s sad to wish for more too late, but this surviving legacy is some compensation for our loss of the pig and his pastry.

Tonight’s episode of “Duets” then, in which the rules are largely, if not entirely explained, effectively works as a do-over. Each week, the performances are graded — anonymously — by the superstars, and it is their feedback that determines the amateurs’ chart standings. (There is a moment in tonight’s episode when the first performer of the night is told her place on the chart. Anti-climactically, it’s the top one, because she is the only person yet to have sung. “Duets” is still working out its showmanship kinks.) Starting next week, the two contestants at the bottom of the chart will have to face-off in an a cappella duel (no trapeze sadly), and the loser will be kicked off the show. In six weeks’ time, “Duets” will go live and the audience will begin to vote on the outcome of each episode. (As to how the victor of the duel will be determined or what the ultimate winner will win, see the “not entirely explained” clause above.)

When written out, these rules may sound boring enough to seem like the sort of yawn-inducing information a TV show could reasonably hope to spare its audience. But they matter. On all the other major singing competitions, after the winnowing down of the audition rounds — those dark weeks when it becomes clear that America lacks for neither competent singers capable of melisma or the disturbed and delusional — it’s the audience that decides who stays and who goes. On “Duets,” for the next six weeks four relatively articulate performing professionals will be the deciders. “Duets” is temporarily putting off the rowdy, democratic voting process, and its tendency to favor sleepy-eyed white boys, to practice the more aristocratic style of expert judgment found on Bravo’s competition shows. “Duets” may be ABC’s answer to “Idol” and “X Factor,” but in rare moments, it’s also the singing version of “Project Runway.”

Though the four judges are too nice (they start and finish each comment with something like, “I love you,” or “you’re great”) they are also informed. They give feedback — the singing is pitchy, too perfect, too scared, the mic is too close, the dancing is bad. “Duets” does not embrace the sort of serious crit sessions seen on “Runway,” “Top Chef” or “Work of Art,” and it would be much better if it did. The judges seem up to it — not only does Kelly Clarkson effortlessly remain more likeable than anyone who has ever appeared on reality TV, I suspect that there is a Nina Garcia lurking inside of John Legend, whose high standards and perfectionism are belied only by the goofy, childish, wide-eyed expression he gets whenever he is watching a performance he enjoys. Real criticism would also rescue the show from its current in-between state, in which it drags on like any bloated musical performance show, but without the energy or stakes of one since, thus far, “Duets” is pre-taped.

The judges’ participation adds a nice new wrinkle to the format. Though it may mean that we will never get to know the amateur contestants well (this show could be called “Singing with the Stars,” despite the reversal of expertise), it should fuel some future sharp exchanges. Kelly Clarkson may not want to lay in to a reality TV contestant, but she can feel no such compunction about digging in to the over-confident Robin Thicke.

That the judges are performers delivers the same message –albeit at a much softer, less-compelling volume — as those Bravo shows: Talent is great, but greatness is hard, hard work. Robin Thicke may seem most concerned with making himself appear sexy, and Jennifer Nettles may not be able to contain her inner cheeseball, but they, like Legend and Clarkson, are professionals in the most complimentary sense of the word: reliable, knowledgeable, focused, dedicated. What they demand of their duet partners is surely nothing compared to what they demand of themselves. Clarkson, especially, is the embodiment of this. Exactly a decade ago she won the first season of “American Idol,” and she is now back on reality TV mentoring the two least polished, most insecure contestants on “Duets.” She chose them, she says, because they both reminded her of herself. She may be right, but they have lots and lots of work to do before before I see it.

In this sense, the new music video for Kanye West and Jay-Z’s track “No Church in the Wild” is the best actual riot porn I’ve ever seen. The video, directed by Romain Gavras, is five minutes of a graphic, fiery and entirely staged riot. It opens with a young man lighting a Molotov cocktail and lobbing it at a line of riot cops as masked comrades behind him raise their arms in support. Filmed in Prague, but presented as a non-specific yet decidedly European urban battleground, riot cops on horses violently beat the masked crowd, who fight back with fire and fists while Greco-Roman statues look on. Were it not for the surprising appearance of a chained elephant amidst the fray in the video’s final frames, the footage looks (almost) like something straight out of Athen’s Syntagma Square. Jay-Z and Kanye don’t feature in the video at all, which makes artistic sense: I’d be more surprised to see Hove in a riot than a two-tonne elephant.

So what to make of riot porn brought to you by those hip-hop moguls and emblems of excess Jay-Z and Kanye? As I noted last year when purveyors of eau-de-date-rape Axe came out with a scent called “Anarchy”, the depiction of anarchism and riotousness in commercial ventures are at least “a nod to the popularity of dissent.” Gavras, who directed the “No Church in the Wild” video, has long riffed on the idea of social upheaval and fierce state repression in his work. His short film for rapper M.I.A’s “Born Free” told the story of U.S. military forces brutally rounding up and executing ginger-haired civilians. The message was lost on no one, and the video was banned from YouTube. Gavras offers a stylized, gritty and startling depiction of social rupture; that his brutal vision of a street riot is deemed popular and consumable enough to accompany some the most mainstream of music is worth consideration. It’s not just anarchists getting off on riot porn anymore.

This isn’t entirely new: There was the Levi’s jeans commercial last year that featured a young man in Levi’s squaring up to riot cops under the tagline, “Now is our time.” The ad was pulled from British television in light of the summer riots in London. The video for Kanye and Jay-Z’s anthem with Rihanna, “Run This Town,” also featured gangs in black bandanas — but it was a far cry in terms of realism and police-on-protester brutality from the riot scenes in “No Church in the Wild.”

My friends at the New Inquiry magazine, Malcolm Harris and Max Fox, have argued that riot imagery and revolutionary calls in products can serve as genuine threats to capitalism, even though they may be expensive ad campaigns or music videos. In a published dialogue between the two (which is well worth reading in its entirety) Fox and Harris agree that subway ads and select lyrics from pop songs are ample materials for would-be rioters. So, while some might see the depiction and glorification of rioters in a hip-hop video as exemplifying capitalist recuperation (even Molotov cocktails can help sell records now!), Harris and Fox suggest that these images can be reappropriated by anti-capitalists — after all, the accessibility of a music video featuring a riot suggests, at the very least, that this sort of dissent resonates. Indeed, Harris quipped on Twitter today, linking to the Jay-Z and Kanye video, “Oh hey, capital, are you sure that’s such a good idea?” and continued to joke about whether the hip-hop artists endorsed black bloc anarchism. We don’t need to make new anti-capitalist propaganda; Kanye and Jay-Z can have Romain Gavras do it while they accidentally offer up revolutionary slogans in their otherwise problematic lyrics. The bridge for “No Church in the Wild”, sung by Frank Ocean, is an insurrectionist two-liner: “I live by you, desire; I stand by you, walk through the fire.”

Of course, none of this is to say Kanye or Jay-Z should be praised as agents for revolutionary change. Jay-Z, aside from celebrating a life of unadulterated excess, is a key voice behind developer Bruce Ratner’s controversial Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, which has been widely criticized for pushing people out of their homes and failing to provide affordable housing and jobs. Meanwhile, Kanye is a famous jerk; he walked by Zuccotti Park once to check out Occupy Wall Street last year, but, again, he is mainly a jerk.

And, it’s worth noting, that the way in which the rioters are glorified in the music video is problematic. I question Gavras’s decision to only feature male rioters. It’s a common criticism of black bloc tactics that they alienate women and perpetuate a masculinist expression of anarchist street actions. Problems of patriarchy in radical scenes certainly abound — indeed it’s an issue too huge to really address here. Suffice to say, however, women across the world who have fought riot police in the streets might take issue with Gavras’s ubiquitously male scene.

But what strikes me the most, and what might make a lot of anarchists and other proponents of street confrontation feel pretty smug, is that Kanye and Jay-Z have the resources to produce pretty much any kind of spectacular music video imaginable. And they opted for riot porn.

Watch the “No Church in the Wild” video below:

What I remember is when my parents bought that brand-new album “Abbey Road” and played this LP on their brand-new faux-antique console hi-fi, right about when they were separating. That had some impact. I can remember feeling like “Golden Slumbers,” McCartney’s brief, melancholy lullaby from that Beatles album, was a lullaby for me in a time when I could have used one.

Well, now I am a dad myself, and I don’t want to make my daughter have to listen to stuff she doesn’t want to listen to (though, in fact, I have tried to sneak Sun Ra onto the stereo in her presence). I don’t want her to feel that music is an intergenerational chore. I would do almost anything to make sure that music, for her, is something to love.

And yet: Nothing makes me happier than when my daughter does take to a particular piece of music on her own. Recently, e.g., she became obsessed with a very excellent tune by the Pogues. It was “If I Should Fall From Grace With God,” which my daughter refers to as the loud-and-fast song. As in: Papa, play the loud-and-fast song. No delight is more delightful than dancing to the loud-and-fast song with a 3-year-old specialist in the pogo.

And yet, sometimes, it must be observed, the sadder songs are the more genuine songs, or: there are times when the sadder songs come into focus, or: perhaps affirmation in a song is a thing of which one should always be suspect. And so there was a day recently that I was spending the day with my daughter, just me and her, and after all the usual pastimes had been exhausted I said, at last, falling into the trap of so many dads, We still have a few hours here, how about we listen to some music?

I put on “Let It Be.” By the Beatles. In fact, I put on the song “Let It Be.” And I’m talking about the version from “Let It Be,” the Phil Spector production, not the George Martin-produced single that you can find easily, not the “Let It Be … Naked” version, which I actually love, too, because I like hearing how guitarist George Harrison thought about what he did on the various recordings. I played my daughter the “Let It Be” I knew best, and which had bludgeoned me much as “Golden Slumbers” had, back in the day, when things at home were coming unglued.

I played the song for her while I was making her a sandwich. It’s really unusual for a 3-year-old to stop moving, unless she’s asleep, and my daughter was not asleep. But she was pretty still. She was transported by the song. Look, you have heard this song 10,000 times, I have heard this song 10,000 times, we are somewhat impervious to the charms of this song, even though it’s a very beautiful song, but when you play it for someone else, in this case someone else who has never heard the song at all, you get back something lost, the original emotional freight of the thing. And with “Let It Be,” which is apparently about a dream Paul had about his dead mother, and, self-evidently, also about the Beatles breaking up, it is hard not to feel that the title, the refrain, is sung with real insight, a real understanding about what it feels like to need the sentiment expressed therein. There really is a lot of misunderstanding and disagreement and dispute in the world, all of it essentially pointless, our time here is so brief, and it would be better if we could all just …

Now, when you’re 3, a sentiment of this kind has maximum impact when repeated, but it’s repeated a lot here, in the song, over and over, and my daughter picked it up quick, the theme, but not so quick that she didn’t want to hear the song again, and so I played the song again, and finished making the sandwich, and then she wanted to hear it again, and I played it again, and then again, and on the third or fourth repetition, that plaintive, moving quality had begun to empty out again, and I was just hearing the song I had heard 10,000 times, and then my daughter asked for it a few more times. We played it six times. That first day. And we have played it more times since. Papa, play that “Let It Be” song.

What’s it like to have resounding success in the dad-playing-music-for-the-kid sweepstakes? I am not sure I want my daughter feeling like she has to like something just because I played it for her. I would like to provide an opportunity, make the music available, then step out of the process, so that she’s absolutely liberated, so that she has self-determination in the matter of her musical interests. That way she can die for Uncle Rock or Dan Zanes if that is what she wants. But I can’t deny, and especially not here, the sense of pride that I feel when she likes something that I too liked, once upon a time in the suburbs. I hope she can do the same when she’s a parent. Maybe one day she’ll share with me things she likes with the same enthusiasm. And maybe one day I can sell her on Sun Ra.