The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [15]
The Stones themselves always said, repeatedly, and their actions proved, what they regarded as their artistic bedrock, but the truth is, to us their music sounded different from Chicago or Delta blues. It’s like going to a distant city and overhearing some strangers have a deep conversation about the place you’re from. They see things you never noticed, and if they never mentioned the name of the place, you might not even recognize that they were talking about your hometown.
Even though I come from Memphis and grew up around some of the music The Stones professed to follow (I didn’t know much about the Chicago stuff), I really couldn’t hear what the connection was supposed to be between what The Stones were playing and what I regularly heard in Memphis. I loved The Stones too, from the first, but it didn’t sound or feel like anything I ever heard coming out of the Delta. I knew it wasn’t the Beatles, but it sounded English to me, what The Stones were doing. Like many fans, I only slowly learned to recognize how the two kinds of music were connected, and as I did begin to understand it, my appreciation for (and understanding of) the blues was transformed.
It took still longer for a lot of other Stones fans (and some still haven’t made the trip home) to go back and successfully “retrieve” the Chicago and Delta blues traditions, but that train ride is worth the trouble. Led Zeppelin was so much more overt in its appropriation of that music, so it was easier to see how they did what they did. But that came later. After doing some intense ear-study, and then listening to The Stones again, especially beginning with Beggar’s Banquet, it all starts falling into place. The Stones’ music has the sort of relationship to Chicago blues that Impressionist painting has to Post-impressionism. If you look at Monet’s flowers next to Van Gogh’s you might agree.
Doomed to Repeat It?
My point here is that the genius of the Glimmer Twins can’t be separated from its historical setting. I’m not saying history made them what they are, I’m just saying that their genius depended on getting history right and being just ahead of the spirit of the times. When the future historians of art take a look at the second half of the twentieth century, in two or three hundred years, The Stones are going to be remembered as serious artists, partly because of their cultural impact, but also because they created something of their own which has lasting aesthetic value, and that was a kind of music that hadn’t existed before. They may end up being mentioned second, after the Beatles, like Mozart and Beethoven, but you could do worse than that. Beethoven also inspired riots by breaking the rules, and he most definitely was a rock star, as was Mozart, in that day. There is something to the old saw “the Beatles or The Stones?” as a way of getting to know someone, but I can’t personally answer the question at all.
Not that it needs defending, but I don’t think anyone ought to sneer if philosophers who specialize in aesthetics take The Stones seriously as artists. Critics clearly do, and sociologists, and historians, and musicologists. The engine of that original contribution to culture is the Jagger-Richards collaboration, and as a collaboration I think it is probably more important than any other in the same time-frame, and I don’t just mean in music. I’m in a good mood, so I’m willing to be argued with about this, but I can’t think of a collaborative team in any medium that is clearly and obviously more important, although the challengers would almost all come from the world of film (I’d put the Coen brothers