The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [28]
The Rolling Stones are not sincere. But that doesn’t mean they don’t mean what they say. They’re forced to mean what they say, because they have brought themselves to the banquet with nothing but their bodies. An interviewer once famously asked Mick whether or not he had gotten any satisfaction. I want to assume the answer and put the question like this: Why can’t Mick get any satisfaction? It’s not because he has a legion of erotic needs, nor because he lacks money or material things. No, Mick Jagger is barred from getting any satisfaction so long as he is telling us in his song that he “can’t get no satisfaction.” We are forced to take his word for it, and so is he. The work, what has always been thought of as the song, is now partly the person who sings it. Mick can’t get satisfaction not because the world has refused to conform to his idea of satisfaction but because his body, his identity has conformed to the demand of the song: he will not be able to get satisfaction so long as he’s singing that song, no matter what the world gives him.
This is not a psychological claim; it’s a philosophical claim, meaning there’s some necessity that comes from the ideas themselves: to say that Mick and Keith and company are the greatest rock’n’roll band is to say that rock’n’roll is the kind of thing whose art-objectivity has expanded to include the Rolling Stones themselves.
What Can a Poor Boy Do?
I think this is why we love The Stones and their music so much. But it also might be what puts them out of our reach. I recently saw a tape of The Stones, in the early days, 1965, on Ready, Steady, Go! just months after “I Can’t Get No (Satisfaction)” had hit the charts. Their set began with some covers from earlier albums, and they played them well, with verve and with a little irony. It was striking how close the audience was to the stage, to The Stones themselves. The teenagers swooned beneath Jagger, some screaming, some chuckling self-consciously when the camera was on them. The Stones went through “Good Thing Going,” and “That’s How Strong My Love Is.” Then Keith struck the first note of “Satisfaction” and a visible change came over both the crowd. Whatever distance had previously separated them from The Stones had to be overcome. But none of the kids in the audience knew exactly how to do this. And so the song was played. Mick toyed with the camera and girls. Brian Jones luxuriated in the attention. There was a shot of Watts, rocking slightly back and forth as he beat out the quarter-note snare, focused, classy, poised. The television camera panned out and the credits appeared on the screen, over the action, over the face of Mick Jagger and over the transfixed audience.
Those credits, I could easily imagine, pointed to the genius of this band in a way that would have frustrated and enthralled any teenager sitting in a 1960s living room watching this. They broke the link between the viewer who wanted to be there, in the audience, near to the band and the growing frenzy of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and returned him or her to their own domesticity, their own ordinariness there in some humdrum living room, with no cameras, no money, no screaming girls, only the glowing black and white screen, and the unreality and utter attraction of the figures framed there.
4
You Probably Think This Chapter’s about You
CHARLES TALIAFERRO AND THERESE COTTER
When is a person vain? Here’s one possibility: How about when he promotes himself as a sexed-up, crazed, macho-chauvinistic, street-fighting, Satanic, sometimes sadistic and sometimes seducing (and sometimes both,