The only completed portion of Bangs's Beyond the Law: Four Rock 'n' Roll Extremists (really? that was the title?), a planned book focusing on Eno, Marianne Faithfull, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and the writer Danny Fields. This is an extended ramble/memoir/conversation/attempt to engage with what the artist's work means and how it feels, on the model of Bangs's work on Lou Reed but with less bleeding and profanity. Eno is (mais naturellement) a great man, and Bangs presents him sensitively, so that he comes off like a gentleman; also there is of course intrinsic interest in his girl picking-up techniques and description of his early life and reminiscences about art school and the glitterdrama that was Roxy Music; but Bangs is too gentlemanly himself, letting him go on at great length and transcribing unstintingly. There's just one too many paragraphs in a row that begin with quotation marks and go on for 300 words without pause.


But Bangs still manages to isolate Eno's most interesting observations--about the terror of art that creates itself without need of supervision; about fun as a legitimate litmus test for dividing a future of new algorithmic forms from a future of technotalitarianism. And he manages to only embarrass himself a little with his 20th-century rockist fretting, always just shying away from saying something like "but what will we do when rock stars aren't keeping it real, man?" because he knows how stupid that is but nevertheless can't quite replace the guitar-hero paradigm without more extensive assurances than Eno, the superflat techromancer, is willing to give. And from 2009, that's the most striking thing about both our characters here, the way they take for granted that pop music is serious, important, earthshaking stuff. Eno was closer, with his music-as-essential-lifestyle-aid, than Bangs with his future shock, but neither of them remotely saw how inessential music would come to seem, how tired, how ineradicably stained with the logic of capital (and I don't just mean that as a criticism--I recognize all the complex ways that availability and freeness has hurt music's mystique and the cultural mulch it needs to thrive). What oh what will cutting-edge art sound like in 2049? ( )