Can you spot the back cover of Meet the Beatles in Lester’s so-called living room?
 
During the brief interval between the 1980 murder of John Lennon and his own death by accidental overdose in 1982, Lester Bangs told a TV crew what he thought about Beatles nostalgia: it sucked. His complaint refers to “Beatlemania,” by which I think he must have meant both the deathless cultural phenomenon and the eponymous movie that opened the year of this interview, based on the (s)hit Broadway musical:

The nostalgia for it and this obsessive living in the past and, y’know, Beatlemania in 1981 is sick. It’s basically that nothing is going on right now, and people are desperate, and there’s a giant nostalgia industry, as we all know. And as far as I’m concerned, Beatlemania is just like Happy Days—it’s a ripoff. And guess who pays? The consumer, and John Lennon.

 

Bangs with Paul and Linda, 1976
 
Luckily, unlike poor old Lester back there in benighted 1981, you and I live in the amazing future year 2016, where there’s never any shortage of new ideas keeping our culture fresh and vital. Pinch me!

Lester’s rant below is excerpted from a longer segment about the Beatles. The YouTube user who uploaded this video and who “hearts” the 80s (meaning, I’m sure, such totally 80s moments as the El Mozote massacre, Chernobyl, the Challenger crash and the Loma Prieta earthquake) says the footage comes from a long-lost series about music called FM-TV.