America's Greatest Rock Critic: A Corpus Stylistics Investigation on Lester Bangs's Texts

Lester Bangs is considered one of the most influential figures in rock journalism. His writing, which conveyed acute observations on Western popular music, was characterized by a highly personal blend of first-person immersion, the use of literary personas, and direct engagement with the reader. This paper investigates Bangs's idiosyncratic style with a corpus-stylistics approach, seeking to shed light on his favored linguistic devices and the broader sociocultural environment of the music press, both vastly understudied areas in applied linguistics. The analysis was carried out on a sample corpus comprising articles authored by Lester Bangs (68 texts, ~137,000 words, ~16,000 tokens). This study systematically identified Bangs's stylistic choices in presenting speech and thought using Semino and Short's model (2004). The corpus was annotated using CATMA 7.1 (Meister 2023), which permits text-external annotation with customized tagsets. The findings indicated that Bangs consistently employed free direct speech (FDS), accounting for 28% of all annotated instances of speech and thought presentation. Bangs extensively used FDS as a stylistic trademark to emulate speech, thus building his literary personas and mirroring his influences from Beat prose. (Free) indirect thought is also prominent, allowing Bangs to engage in self-reflection. Bangs's peculiar writings offer an entry point into the style of music journalism, a peculiar combination of cultural critique and aesthetic commentary suitable for multidisciplinary frameworks in the humanities.