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Our love was like the water

that splashes on a stone.

Our love is like our music:

it’s here and then it’s gone.

It’s difficult to listen to these words and not hear, just beneath the surface, what would become a self-referential observation. Beggars Banquet will be Brian Jones’s last contribution to a studio recording, and in this song he is masterly with the slide guitar. In the televised version of the Rock and Roll Circus, we can see a glimmer of his mania. The image of water and a stone will become more bizarre when, a year later, Brian Jones drowns in a swimming pool. More broadly, the Sixties were nearing their pinnacle, and all the idealism and benevolence that had arisen in the youth of that generation would be forfeited at Altamont in December 1969. The Rolling Stones were at the height of their powers then, and it’s easy to imagine that their fate was bound up with the larger movements of their generation. History—whether art history, political history or personal history—is such that no one will “pass through here again.” You could even argue that history rewards those who don’t expect to do so.

Certainly The Stones had to abandon their original expectation that they would remain a rhythm and blues band playing covers of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley tunes. It was inevitable that they would have to write their own songs if they wanted to make it big. One afternoon, when The Stones were rehearsing at Studio 51 Club, in walked John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They’d heard from Andrew Oldham that The Stones were having trouble coming up with a song. Being the serious creative types, Lennon and Paul—“who are by that time very much into hustling songs”—sat down to the piano and played a bit of something they’d been working on. Mick and Keith liked it, and so Lennon and McCartney wrote the middle eight bars, finishing what would be the Rolling Stones’ first hit “I Wanna Be Your Man.” As their popularity increased, the issue of writing an original song became more urgent. Shortly after recording their first LP, which consisted of all covers of American rhythm and blues tunes and rock’n’roll hits, Mick Jagger was quoted in a newspaper as saying “Can you imagine a British-composed R&B number?—it just wouldn’t make it.” Shortly after this their manager Andrew Oldham locked Keith and Mick in the kitchen and refused to let them out until they had written a song.3

This complicates our depiction of rock’n’roll as a thing that gets better the more it stays the same. “No Expectations” seems to say that the past is not always a given. It’s not just that the music gets boring; it becomes irrelevant, left behind by the march of time. “No Expectations” seems to suggest that the dominant view of art is right, that a musician strives to make meaningful variations on the material that preceded him—just enough to keep his stuff sounding new—but at the same time remains true to his origins.

The problem is that this view leaves us entirely in the dark about what constitutes meaningful variation. How are we to know whether a song matters? What exactly allows us to recognize a new, innovative arrangement of chords in a very finite schema (there’re only twelve notes, after all)? Does the slight shift in emphasis when Jagger sings the line “pain in my heart, won’t let me sleep,” really differ from Otis Redding’s singing those same lines? Does such a slight alteration justify our calling it new or just an imitation?

What’s Puzzling You Is the Nature of My Game

The eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant faced a closely related problem in thinking about aesthetics. In his Critique of Judgment, he argues that works of art can and do in fact come into the world that are at once genuinely new and intelligible to audiences by virtue of their relationship to the past. This might seem obvious, but let me explain the problem Kant is trying to solve, since it is directly applicable to the problem of originality and newness in rock’n’roll.

For something