The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [115]
And yes, like Socrates, the Stones had to defend themselves against their critics. Adults often did not like the way The Stones went about using their new soapbox to promote their music and their records. But in fact they advanced the musical landscape and were a part of changing the social landscape. Without The Rolling Stones fighting back and refusing to back down, we might now have been discussing the “great sin against music” that once forced a great band off the stage.
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How Mick Learned to Love the Devil
RICHARD BERGER
They could always play, but it took time for the songs to flow. The first incarnation of The Stones was a cover band. They played the music they liked to listen to and turned a white, middle-class British audience onto the Blues.
The Stones were always a band that had a sense of heritage, and even when they began to write their own songs, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards still drew heavily on a range of musical sources. What changed, however, was Mick’s increasing reliance on literature for inspiration.
“Sympathy for the Devil” was one song of many (including “Sister Morphine” and “Wild Horses”) that were written and recorded during Mick’s relationship with Marianne Faithfull. Marianne’s influence on The Stones is well documented, although perhaps not appreciated as much as it should be. “Sympathy” is one of the darkest moments of The Stones’ mythology. Ever after it helped define them as rock’s demonic bad boys. But the song is based on a once-obscure Russian novel called The Master and Margarita, written by Mikhail Bulgakov, itself a critique of the philosophical ideas of Saint Augustine of Hippo. It’s also a very moral song. “Sympathy” can be read a response to, and an updating of, the philosophy of Augustine, particularly the notion of “evil.”
Saint Augustine seems an unlikely influence on the world’s greatest rock band, but he was, in many respects, quite a rebel himself. He wrestled most of his life with his own sin, a struggle that culminated in his influential Confessions, a book that exerts quite a pull on Mick’s lyrics for “Sympathy.”
Just as Every Cop Is a Criminal, and All the Sinners Saints
Augustine’s philosophy was about the nature of evil and the limits and responsibilities of free will. Who hasn’t mused on the origin of evil when reading a newspaper or watching the news? It was no different for The Stones in 1968, with Vietnam and the deaths of the Kennedy brothers on their minds. It was the same too for Mikhail Bulgakov in the 1920s, with the assassinations of the Russian Royal family still in living memory, as it was for Augustine way back in 387.
Augustine lived between 354 and 430 A.D. and for thirty years was Bishop of Hippo—now the coastal city of Annaba in Algeria. He started off as a pagan, like his father, believing that the world was the product of two Gods—one good, and one evil—a belief known at the time as the “Manichean heresy.” Later, he converted to the Catholicism of his mother and was fascinated by the miracles portrayed in the New Testament. He then discovered the writings of Plato and decided that evil was not a force in its own right but instead an ‘absence’ of what should be—a topic Mick Jagger would touch upon in his lyrics centuries later. But, Augustine had a problem:
because such little piety as I had, compelled me to believe that God, who is good, could not have created an evil nature. (Confessions 5.10)
For Augustine, the existence of evil challenged the notion of an all-powerful and good God: if such a God existed, why did-n’t He just rid the world of evil? If He had created everything, and “everything” includes