The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [37]
Keith and Bentham wouldn’t be bothered by the idea that some things require thought to produce pleasure, so long as such pleasures are not accorded a higher moral value than animal pleasures. Did Mill think that those uniquely human pleasures were of higher value than the animal pleasures? It certainly seems so, but this may have simply been the prudish Victorian in Mill speaking. For the Victorians, sex was a moral duty, and a place “in between the sheets” meant a bookmarked book page.
Telecast Mill some 110 years into the future, with those preconceptions stripped away, stick him on the tour bus, and I’m sure Mick, Keith, and the boys would demonstrate to his satisfaction that rock’n’roll is both a higher and a lower pleasure.19
6
Paint the Flowers Black
RICK MAYOCK
While the Beatles are singing “Good Day Sunshine,” Mick Jagger is screaming “I want to see the sun blotted out from the sky.” In the midst of the sunny optimism of the mid-1960s pop music explosion, The Rolling Stones’ songs were dark and out of step with the times.
Innocent and carefree lyrics, The Stones seemed to be saying, do not always reflect the culture or the times, especially a decade torn by poverty, war, racial prejudice, and segregation. The times, as Bob Dylan said, were “a-changin’,” and the music of The Rolling Stones began to reflect some of those changes.
Unlike The Beatles, with their sanitized pop idol image, The Stones preferred to see themselves as outcasts and misfits, as beggars at a banquet. From Keith Richards’s perspective, they were blues artists, not pop stars. “We’re anti-pop, we’re anti-ballroom, all we want to do is be the best blues band in London” (Life, p. 109). Their rebellious image set them apart from The Beatles and other British Invasion groups, and their focus on the blues made them advocates of the music of the oppressed.
Philosophy also has its sunny and optimistic periods that reflect an attitude of hopefulness and progress. This kind of optimism found expression in the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that celebrated reason as a way of attaining knowledge, freedom, and happiness. It was an optimism based on the belief that we can discover truth, in its purest form, that reason will enable us to reveal the secrets of the universe, help us to solve our social and political problems, and show us how to live good, virtuous lives.
But it came under attack by critics in the post-Enlightenment, or post-modern movement, beginning with Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and continuing in the twentieth century with Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) and others. Suspicions arose about the motives that drive this philosophical optimism, suspicions that revealed an underlying set of unexamined assumptions about the origins of philosophical concepts. This optimism in philosophy is an expression of what Derrida calls “white mythology.”20
Philosophical thinking that relies on abstract concepts and reason becomes a kind of mythology, according to Derrida. Like all mythological thinking, it requires an attitude of faith, an unwillingness to question its beliefs and practices, and a denial of the sources and origins from which it arises—all in the attempt to see its teachings as universally true. It can also propagate and sustain a sense of privilege and superiority by its adherents and marginalize those who are excluded and oppressed.
White mythology is not exclusively an intellectual movement. It is also a cultural phenomenon, which includes attitudes about music. As The Rolling Stones attune themselves to the blues, they reject the optimism of white pop music and return to the musical roots