The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [27]
This is Kant’s answer to what we value most about art, what sets it apart from other kinds of creations. The engineer might say, “Here’s the plan, here’s what works,” and whether or not he succeeds depends on how well he sticks to the plan. You could say the same for the businessman, who understands products that will satisfy the market’s demands. Both the product of the engineer and of the businessman are products of creativity. But they are determined by a design that can be fully articulated in a systematic way. Their form that they take in the world is already decided by the idea they are supposed to fulfill. This is not so with art. Art, in the hands of the genius, is free from such determining constraints.
The Beggars at the Banquet
It may seem now that the Kant hasn’t solved anything at all regarding The Rolling Stones or “Parachute Woman.” The genius for Kant is, if nothing else, an artist who generates (hence the name). “Originality,” he says, “must be a primary characteristic” of the genius (p. 186). But The Rolling Stones, from their inception, were decidedly unoriginal. The R&B tunes Keith and Brian dug up to perform in front of those audiences of febrile teeny-boppers may have been obscure, but they were not new. The Rolling Stones are famous, or infamous, for stealing what other people have made, songs that others have written, singing styles that others had invented, lyrics and melodies and guitar licks that were solidly ingrained in the rock’n’roll mythic past. The Rolling Stones seem like beggars at the banquet table of music history.
What is it that a beggar brings to the table? He brings a mouth, an appetite. He has nothing of his own to bring. His blue jeans have holes in them, his “shirt’s all torn.” The reason the Rolling Stones are the greatest rock’n’roll band is precisely because of what they have brought to the table: their bodies, themselves.
The genius of The Stones, in Kant’s sense of the word, is that they have altered the aesthetic object in question, music, in an important way by becoming a constitutive part of that object. We can’t think about the music of The Stones and, at the same time, think about the individual members, their bodies, Mick’s maniacal dancing, Keith’s trademark slouching, Bill’s statuesque motionlessness, and so on. This is one reason why they so transfixed their teenage fans and made their parents very, very nervous. “Would you let your daughter go with a Rolling Stone?” the papers famously asked.
Kant’s conception of genius explains how the Rolling Stones themselves, their bodies, entered the frame of their music and merged with it. It is not a coincidence that we think of the rock-’n’roll spirit as natural to the boys in the band. Keith Richards fascinates me because he’s so natural—not merely a natural at guitar (we can say that about a lot of studio musicians, or even the charmless Eric Clapton), but that he’s got a natural rock-’n’roll essence. It gets to the heart of the matter that we can see this: we look to his person, his character, his body and how he acts on the stage, in the studio, and at home after a tour when he starts drinking because he gets bored, waiting for the next time he and his telecaster can take the stage.
You might say that any rock band merge themselves with their work in this way, but that’s not true. What comes to mind when you think “Strawberry Fields Forever”? It’s probably not John Lennon himself, in the same way that Keith and Mick flash before your eyes the moment someone says “Brown Sugar” or “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” A self-styled artist like Lennon wanted his art to have a life