The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [10]
The tempting word for what they make together is genius, but I think in their case we’re more likely to want to call the outcome—the song, the show, the video—a work of genius than pin the label on either of our twins. The word “genius” has a weird sort of history. It used to be thought of as a sort of spirit that comes from beyond and settles on certain people for a time. Then it came to be thought of like a reliable muse of some sort. People would say “he has the genius of writing” or “she has the genius of painting.” But nobody said that one person or another was “a genius,” in our modern sense, until the late eighteenth century. There was a dude with the unfortunate name of Immanuel Kant (which is pronounced very close to what you think—it’s what Keith calls people he really holds in contempt). He made good on his name, some people think, by being one. But he’s the guy who wrote about genius in a way that stuck:
Genius is the talent (natural endowment) that gives the rule to art. Since talent is an innate productive ability of the artist, and as such belongs itself to nature, we could also put it this way: Genius is the innate mental disposition through which nature gives the rule to art… . For every art presupposes rules … [and] since a product can never be called art unless it is preceded by a rule, it must be nature in the subject (and through the attunement of his powers) that gives the rule to art. (Critique of Judgment, pp. 174–75)
Admittedly the guy is a little bit stuffy. Okay, he’s a twit, but this really is the guy who is responsible for the way we talk about individual people being “geniuses” these days. We added scientists and mathematicians in with the artists somewhere along the way, but at first it was just artists. Something in their subjective natures allows them to produce works that give the rule to the rest of the art. To be genius, Kant goes on to say, talent procures originality, originality leads the work to be an exemplar, and ”exemplarity” of the work just is nature in the artist. Blah, blah, blah. It’s a fancy way of saying they’re not supernatural, but they’re not exactly like us, either.
Kant goes on to say that geniuses don’t understand and can’t explain their own powers, and you might as well not bother asking them because all you’ll get is bullshit. (That’s my summary; Kant himself, being very old-fashioned, rarely used the word “bullshit.”) This all seems fine, as far as it goes, but why do some people have this genius and others don’t? And also, I think he left out something really crucial, which is that sometimes genius works only when two people are at it together. So we’re back to Mick and Keith, together.
Let It Bleed
To get the philosophical stuff worked out, we’ll have to rehearse our facts, as far as we can know them. It’s sort of like trying to guess what happens inside of a marriage. You never really know, even if you’re the marriage counselor. Even if you get to hear both sides and ask any question, you still don’t really know. But we do the best we can with what we have, and I’ll try not to draw too many conclusions about what really happened between Mick and Keith, when they were being geniuses. (It’s a little clearer what to think when they’re just being assholes, since we can all pretty well pull that off. )
Even though Keith usually wrote the music and Mick the lyrics, there weren’t any rules in their collaboration, and these guys never liked rules very much anyway (and we all know what they’d think of Kant). Some songs are all Mick’s, some are all Keith’s, and every variation in between, and some of those, although largely created alone, are works of genius (or at least rules through which the nature of rock’n’roll gives