The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [128]
Jagger agreed to help Anger by composing music for the film’s score—an ear-piercing improvisation on his newly acquired Moog synthesizer.
Flowers of Evil
The Rolling Stones embraced their diabolic power to conjure primal forces of rebellion, pandemonium, and orgiastic anarchy. At almost every date on a European tour, savage violent clashes between audiences and authorities exploded, turning shows into a military exercise involving attack dogs, tear gas, batons, and blood. Everywhere they played, The Stones were searched, raided, and intimidated. Their antiestablishment stance made them the focal point of revolutionary fervor.
The Stones projected a nineteenth-century Romantic vision of Lucifer as the rebellious angel, the sexual provocateur, the pagan satyr of Dionysiac celebrations. This romantic conception of evil developed in Europe mainly in literature. Artistic revolutionaries—responding to the massive social and political upheavals caused by the French, American, and Industrial revolutions—attacked Christianity as part of an authoritarian order. Rejecting 1,800 years of Western Christian tradition, Augustinian philosophy, and its absolutist vision of evil, romantic poets like William Blake and Charles Baudelaire saw Satan as a symbol of resistance to the tyranny of the Old Regime. If the greatest enemy of traditional Christianity was Satan, then Satan must be a heroic rebel against unjust authority. Emulating Lucifer, the Romantic Artist stands alone against the world and strives to liberate humanity from a society that blocks its freedom, passion, and creativity.
The most original artist of the period, visionary British poet and painter William Blake (1757–1827) was fascinated by this idea that the Devil was a positive social force. In his richly illustrated poem “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (1790), Blake’s Satan symbolized creativity, emotion and energy—liberation from reason and orthodoxy, the twin engines of oppression. Rebelling against God’s repressive authority, Satan acted on impulse and represented the human desire for freedom. Blake provoked his readers, writing things like “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires,”66—an even more outrageous sentiment than The Stones’ dark vision of lust and murder in “Midnight Rambler.”
Criticizing St. Augustine’s notion of Original Sin as a kind of physical infection, Blake believed that religion devalues the body and distorts human nature. He further believed that organized religion snuffs out emotional life by promoting the primacy of reason. To Blake, these repressive chains can only be broken by frenzied energy: Evil is a progressive force, the energy needed to break boundaries, unify ourselves, and truly transcend evil. In his “Proverbs of Hell” Blake said, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” (Blake, Plate 7).
In France, Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)—the Mick Jagger of Romantic Poets—combined a strident anticlericism with an emerging gothic sensibility, finding in Satan a symbol of everything from human freedom to dark, frightening, and seductive beauty. He portrayed the Devil as a subversive spirit who embodies political revolution and opposes fear-mongering systems of power and oppression. Like Blake, he points out the debilitating influences of dogmatic Christianity and Augustinian thinking. Baudelaire linked Christian dogma to tyrannical political systems, analytical philosophy, and empirical science—all of which sever the body from soul, sex from love, desire from reason and prevent us from transcendently merging these aspects of our nature. For Baudelaire, the true god is authenticity.
In his quest for spontaneity and immediacy, Baudelaire gave free reign to his urges and passions, liberating himself from religious repression and social conformity. He obsessed over dreams, took drugs, and experienced hallucinations that were strange and bizarre, brutal and grotesque, demented and demonic.