Why I Love Lester

his natural ability at getting a possibly difficult person such as Eno to just casually talk, “The person I did meet that day was relaxed, gracious, and, to use his favorite word, one of the most interesting conversationalists I'd run into in some time.” To establish his good moral standing, Lester demonstrates in the article that he was fully able to put his usual hedonist tendencies aside and act as a real writer and journalist, meticulously cataloguing a notoriously shadowy figure of pop culture, and is then able to demonstrate to the audience that even though he has his reservations about Eno and electronic music, his research proves that Eno is a serious musical mind, whatever medium he may choose to create his art.
Lester uses intimate distance in the article to acknowledge both his love of the work of Brian Eno as well as the overall importance of the man’s music in the modern era, thus arguing that electronics are a new and exciting form of popular music. His language illuminates the importance of Eno’s work and his place in society. He offers two opposing views of Eno’s work, one that his work is cold and distant, too depersonalized to be music, and the other than his music is more about spirituality and Zen-like qualities than it is melody and tone, thus a legitimate musical form. He writes, “Eno's work might be the ultimate sonic sartorial for the depersonalized, narcissistic sophisticate of the present and immediate future. But this refusal-- or inability-- to ultimately commit to anything in particular may well be what could ultimately prevent it from being great art. We live at the first time in human history when the basic humanity of a given piece of art might be considered suspect.” He then says that despite his or anyone else’s reservations, that Eno’s ability to create spiritually inclined music that is derived from technology will ultimately help people come to terms with technology easier, he writes, “Maybe he will ultimately help us all to make a more complete (and uncompromised) peace with all these machines which he perceives as machines of loving grace, as perhaps anyone as individualistic as himself would have to be repulsed by life in the hive. In a strange way, his music raises these issues in spite of itself; in the final analysis, not only Brian Eno's whole career but what might even be his real contribution to the human future could prove to be one huge happy accident.”
By using rhetorical methods, Bangs sheds light on Eno’s interesting character and unique contributions to music and art. He ultimately proves to the audience that whether they like technology or not, that technology will only advance and it naturally will affect music and art as well. He presents himself as a bold critic and social witness to the technology boom, and relates it directly to his love of music of which is becoming mechanized in the modern world, and uses the legend of Eno to prove that this isn’t a terrible occurrence.