The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [129]
Like Jagger, Baudelaire was a controversial figure in his time, suspected of being a devil worshipper and a drug addict, only the latter of which was true. Like The Stones, Baudelaire’s name became synonymous with decadence. A French court condemned Flowers of Evil and banned several individual poems, one of which—“Damned Women”—involved lesbian love. In response, he mocked the court and took pride in the fear-inspiring book.
Humans are devils, according to Baudelaire; Satan serves merely as an imaginary scapegoat. Like Blake, he believed that passivity, boredom, and malaise easily infected us and compelled our complicity in the horrors of the world: “In our miserable brains, swirl the Demons of the Deep; He is Ennui!—more malevolent than his Mother, You know him this delicate monster, Hypocritical Reader—my Brother!” Like “Sympathy for the Devil,” Flowers of Evil was mistaken as satanic, but Baudelaire’s true purpose was to claim that we, not Satan, have created hell on earth. By externalizing evil as a mythological creature, we fail to confront and defeat it within ourselves.
The Devil Is My Name
Referring to “Sympathy for the Devil,” Jagger told Rolling Stone in 1995, “I think that was taken from an old idea of Baudelaire’s, I just took a couple of lines and expanded on it.” The lyrics, spoken in the voice of the devil, also correspond to parts of Mikhail Bulgakov’s satirical surrealist novel The Master and Margarita, given to Jagger by Marianne Faithfull. Kenneth Anger said the song arose from conversations he had with Jagger about Lucifer Rising. Influences aside, “Sympathy for the Devil”—whose working title was “The Devil is My Name”—cast Jagger as the Prince of Darkness. Channeling “Hell Hound on My Trail” through Blake and Baudelaire, Jagger recounts the evils wrought by humanity under the influence of a satanic trickster who in the end is just a reflection of us.
The song’s recording, documented by radical French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard,68 took several nights of fumbling and grasping, turning from a country dirge to become a voodoo samba. Over percussive bongos, conga drums, and death-rattle maracas, Jagger yelps, screeches, grunts, and moans as if he’s emerging from hell. The song builds into a wild celebration of humanity’s hatred, hypocrisy, and violence—Christ’s crucifixion, European religious wars, the Russian Revolution, the Blitzkrieg, the Holocaust, and the Kennedy assassinations. Robert Kennedy was killed on June 5th, 1968, while The Stones were recording, compelling Jagger to pluralize the lyric to “Who Killed the Kennedys?” to account for this latest horror.
Like the poetry of Blake and Baudelaire, the song paints a picture of an inverted world gone mad: Cops are criminals; saints are sinners; God is the devil. Among The Stones’ most brilliant songs, “Sympathy for the Devil” mocks the human race for its destructive wars and violence, putting humanity on trial by the devil rather than the other way around. Satan ridicules human beings for their intense hypocrisy, their willingness to cloak their warlike and greedy nature under the veneer of religion.
Lucifer’s Dream Ends
By the end of 1968, the nightmares of Lucifer flourished throughout a year of catastrophes including the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, riots that set city blocks ablaze, and the Soviet invasion of Prague. With half a million troops in Vietnam, the war penetrated and infected everything. Europe was in turmoil. The young took to the barricades in Paris and around the world from Warsaw to Washington and confronted repressive, reactionary governments.
The Stones attracted more controversy with the first single from Beggars Banquet, “Street Fighting Man.” Released just days after Mayor Daley’s Chicago police had attacked and beaten war protestors at the Democratic