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If you think I am going to review the new It's Only Rock N Roll album right now, you are crazy. But I am going to swim in it.

If they don’t come through you’re lucky, because you got yourself to fall back on, so don’t worry, but meanwhile you gotta tear those pictures down from your wall and paste up some new icons which probably don’t even exist.

Ain’t it American to think Mick Jagger is as dopey as you and me, wandering from bistro to backstage as if he didn’t have something better to do like sitting at home reading the new Joseph Heller book (both of which are where the real terror is), preserving his mystique, but no the guy wants to look regular just like Dylan before him except he also wants in like Lennon wanted in when he married Yoko and compromised himself in the process. Just a misunderstood adolescent who needs love so kick him in the head while the time is right. I remember when the Stones meant something but it's banal to say that by now and we will have to work harder. Hours slogged working for the luxury of enjoying the Rolling Stones. Which is not the way it should be at all, right? Right?

We don’t care, we eat product as cynically as they dish it, too bad.After all, the Stones have a lot to stand for. After all, so do we. Tedium is relative, right? So they’re asking us simpleton questions: Did you ever wonder what would happen if we set rock in space and forgot about it? Did you ever wanna kill what weaned you? Well, don’t try too hard. The next generation will not live for no burnout myth and then how will we all look clinging to and rationalizing this shit? Eight-year-olds are gonna demand that somebody say something pretty soon. This album will not endure, but neither will Blonde on Blonde. They will never surf again. So maybe we should appreciate the noise they make drowning, friends.

Dear Mick,

You always play ignorant. Why?

You’ve been projecting yourself on me all along.

You remind me of an apathetic antibody. But that's all right.

There is a certain resignation about you. But you’re not stagnant.

You hate pretension in all its forms, so you overcompensate.

You like things for the wrong reasons. Always.

If you ever got sick I would never be around you. I would never see you. Why take chances?

We haven’t known each other that long.

The best things are the ones that start slow, uncertainly, and build.

I don’t love you. I just like being around you.

The Stones have become oblique in their old age, which is just another word for perverse except that perverse is the corniest concept extant as they realized at inception which is more than you can say for Lou Reed who had to go solo to figure it out. A load of laffs is what you won’t get from any new Stones album and more's the pity. It's like they believed that Hollywood slit in Star magazine who said Mick was just an old buzzard and are determined to prove themselves while we lose interest, spattered mutterings that surface here and there, like that bass whomp that Charlie gives the opening of that damn latest single which like the bricks smashing together in the second chorus of “Hip Shake” proves he's still the greatest drummer in rock because the most subtle. He hits you when you least expect it while doing a job, and that's where the true story is. You’ve all gotta get straight and discover your alienation which is why do ya think kid the Stones work so hard touring year in and out just like Bill Wyman told me in an interview I never transcribed because he was such a cipher: “We’re too busy to be decadent.” Right, right, so is my mother, why don’t you wait tables for a while, take a vacation, or at least commit suicide for real? Sense of struggle in the merest filler which maybe is funny ultimately. Exile was like a sheathed nerve that surfaced in weeks. Soup was friendly and safe. I want the edge and this album doesn’t reassure me that I’ll get it, what a curious situation to be stuck in, but maybe that's the beauty of the Stones,