From Salon's article on the new collection of Lester Bangs essays:

Well, I'll tell you why you should care. Because Lester cared, goddammit. Lester believed music mattered, and even in this age of facile overproduced musical commoditization, of Britney Spears and Toby Keith and p-diddy-puff-daddy ludicrousness, of manufactured controversy and preprogrammed stardom, of music-as-fashion and fashion-as-cultural-critique, even now we should still be furrowing our brows and raising our voices and slamming our fists on the table and declaiming to anyone and everyone in earshot that music still matters. Sure, it might be harder than ever before to push our way through the shrouds obscuring us from the real shit, to try to pry out some sliver of authenticity from the truckloads and truckloads of odious stinking garbage that surrounds us at every remove, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't make the effort. And it does mean that now, more than ever, we need Lester.

Yeah, man. Yeah.