The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [16]
In The Shadows
Some of the other puzzles about the Glimmer Twins include their sometimes contradictory accounts of the collaboration itself. They agree on many points, of course, but their views of what they were doing, how it happened, who did what, well, it isn’t easy to decide what to believe. How can people who were both there, and who collaborated so successfully, many thousands of times, disagree so thoroughly on what was happening, and where, and when? This practical question becomes theoretically interesting, too, when we ask, to what extent is anyone really a good or reliable or authoritative interpreter of his or her own experience—especially creative experience? I think this is the key to the whole thing: how well anyone really understands his own experiences, especially the creative ones.
Hegel thinks the artists don’t understand at all what they do when they give sensuous expression to the “objective spirit” moving in history. And they don’t need to, according to him. So he thinks history made The Stones what they were and are, and it had nothing to do with what they set out to do, or took themselves to be doing. On the other hand, Langer thinks artists do understand what they’re doing and how to do it, but they are discursively “untrained,” and their “difficult thoughts” resist clear formulation. These two philosophers can’t both be right. Or can they?
Like some of you, I am old enough to remember when everybody thought Mick was the Rolling Stones. Keith was quiet and a little bit menacing, but he was just “in the band” as far as most people knew. It took the world quite some time to begin to discern what was really happening within the group. Keith just wasn’t the sort to draw our particular attention to himself, and back in those days people didn’t think of The Stones with the sort of seriousness and questioning we now take for granted. Their importance has come partly from their stamina at the top of the heap of pop art, and partly from our growing hindsight. We have enough distance now to see how very important this music was. We thought it was just the soundtrack of our lives, but now we’re in a position to see that the music, and these artists, were also changing our consciousness, our ideas about value, about social acceptability, about art.
So The Stones were great, but until Keith stepped out of the shadows (the last ten years or so) they weren’t a puzzle that needed a solution or an enigma that demanded a theory. All we saw was an unusually good English rock band with an image of being rough around the edges, with a prancing, leaping fool in the front; and what we heard was pop songs that were edgy and irreverent. The mediator of all we saw and heard was Mick’s twitchy, big-lipped, strained, in-your-faceness. Keith was, at most, a brooding, dangerous, semi-animal, whose black eyes flashed in a challenge to any and all. He didn’t seem much different from the rest of the band, and he certainly didn’t fit our preconceived notion of a creative force in pop culture. His name went second behind Mick’s. That’s what we knew.
Saviors of Rock’n’Roll
Things have really changed, nowadays. We didn’t get tired of Mick, but slowly we also became more fascinated by Keith. We knew Mick was an intellectual, that he aspired to elite circles, that he navigated the full range of possible social domains from dope dealers to Knight of the Realm. (Can you believe that shit? The guy with his hand down his pants, licking Ronnie Wood on live network TV, that dude is “Sir Michael Jagger”?) He got away with it all, the court jester who is smarter than the court. Meanwhile, Keith was and is mysterious and dangerous, and he had a talent for suffering, for taking into his