Why I Love Lester

In his essay, “Brian Eno: A Sandbox in Alphaville”, Lester Bangs, arguably the greatest Rock n’ Roll writer of all time, uses ethical methods including doing the homework, establishing good character, and intimate distance in an attempt to demystify some of Brian Eno’s legend, and argue for the importance and place of electronics in modern music. Bangs conducts massive amounts of research and extensive interviews with the legendary producer, musical philosopher, and creator of the ambient music genre. Though at this time he was already the most respected critic in his field, Lester still uses some of the classic rhetorical means of establishing ethos in the essay.
In that way, he uses both forms of ethical proof: invented and situated. His situated ethos is the fact that at this point in his career he had already established himself as a unique and singular vision in the landscape of rock writing, and had to say little for people to take his opinion as gospel when it came to contemporary music. But, in the essay, Lester actually uses invented ethical proof as well. He used extensive research, cataloguing Eno’s music and career, as well as conducted numerous interviews with Eno himself; in an effort to the have the audience see him and the work from a true journalistic perspective. His extensive knowledge of Eno’s life and work as well as the casual dialog he developed with the man give credence to the face that though he was writing only about music, Lester was still a serious writer and social critic.
Lester clearly adheres to the rhetorical school of thought that a writer can only present themselves as intelligent through demonstrating that they have put in the time of doing the homework and the research. He presents himself in the first paragraph in the first person, meticulously listening to Eno’s music, even describing some of it and how it sounds to him, as well as meticulously researching the man.
Lester says, “The other day I was lying on my bed listening to Brian Eno's Music For Airports. The album consists of a few simple piano or choral figures put on tape loops which then run with variable delays for about ten minutes each, and is the first release on Eno's own Ambient label. Like a lot of Eno's "ambient" stuff, the music has a crystalline, sunlight-through-windowpane quality that makes it somewhat mesmerizing even as you only half-listen to it, Listing all the projects he's been involved with in his career so far is a bit like trying to enumerate the variegate colors and patterns on a lizard's back.” Lester continues on with a detailed description of Eno’s career to that point, and it is clear to the reader that he is more than familiar with the man’s music and his place in popular culture. One of the most fascinating things about Lester Bangs’ writing was that he never assumed. Though he could usually safely believe that he was often “preaching to the choir” when it came to his music essays, he always took the time to give the best, most concise, and least biased view of a musician that he could demonstrate (except when it came to Lou Reed evidently).
To further his credibility, Lester talks of the extremely casual and likeable relationship that he and Eno established through their interviews. By showing the audience that Lester, a man of infamous glutton and debauchery, could talk humbly and interestedly with Eno, a man of considerable prestige and academic appeal, he proves that he is both a common man and a man of intelligence that is truly interested in the issues at hand. He even admits his reservations to interviewing a man as prestigious as Eno, “I had been following his work for years, and just wanted to find out what kind of guy he was. I didn't expect much, really, or rather what I expected was either some narcissistic twit or more likely a character whose head was permanently lodged in the scientific/cybernetic/conceptual art clouds. Somebody who might be nice enough but was just a little too... ethereal.” But ultimately demonstrates