The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [39]
Standing in the Shadow
For Keith, the band’s mission was to reawaken white America to the blues. “We turned white America’s brains and ears around,” he writes. The Beatles broke the door down, “and then they got stuck inside their own cage, ‘The Fab Four’” (Life, p. 159). Black music was marginalized to regional radio audiences, and blues artists in America were struggling to get by. Keith even remembers Muddy Waters doing menial labor at the Chess Records studio in Chicago in order to stay on the payroll.
The plan worked. While The Stones became popular as a blues band, they discovered that they are also songwriters capable of producing top-forty hits that question the reigning white mythology of pop. Yes, they created occasional ballads of arresting beauty and aristocratic imagery, as in “Lady Jane” and “Back Street Girl.” Yet even in their ballads the lyrics express a shadowy darkness that turns away the metaphysics of presence. The first song Mick and Keith write together is a picture of sadness evoked by children playing in the evening, “Smiling faces I can see, but not for me, I sit and watch as tears go by.”23 Mick and Keith unveil the dark side by turning to the shadows where your mother may be standing: “live in the shadow, see through the shadow, live through the shadow, tear at the shadow, hate in the shadow, and love in your shadowy life” (Have You Seen Your Mother Baby Standing in the Shadow?”).
Out of the Cave
The heliotropic tradition in philosophy began with Plato (429–347 B.C.E.) who used the image of the sun as the symbol of enlightenment, contrasted with the ignorance and darkness of the cave. Plato’s story about prisoners condemned to live in a dark cave is an allegory about life in the absence of philosophical reflection—what Socrates (470–399 B.C.E.) called the “unexamined life.” Medieval philosophers continued the tradition by referring to the presence of divine ideas in the mind as “illumination.” Historians refer to the long period when much science and learning was at a standstill as the “Dark Ages,” and the great flowering of human knowledge that culminates in the eighteenth century as the “Enlightenment.” These are all examples of a rich metaphoric tradition that collects truth, knowledge, beauty—all things that are good—into images of light and the opposite into images of darkness.
God is in the spotlight of this tradition, too, represented in theological texts as the light or the sun. Jesus declared himself the “light of the world” and in his conversion St. Paul was blinded by the light of Christ’s divinity. St. Paul says we see the divine presence “through a glass darkly,” and only later face to face (1 Corinthians 13:12). The Stones’ retrospective album Big Hits, Volume 2 is a journey “Through the Past, Darkly.” The songs on it continue to provide a darker alternative to sunny pop imagery and, on subsequent album covers, The Stones themselves project an image of a darker, brooding defiance.
A philosophical tradition that ignores the shadows, Nietzsche believed, is in danger of marginalization and distortion. Nietzsche recognizes that “shadow is as needful as light” and acknowledges the necessity of opposites in philosophical thinking. Derrida’s method of deconstructing the metaphysics of presence similarly aims to overturn the classical oppositions of presence-absence, positive-negative, good-evil, light-shadow, in order to reveal the less obvious, less “present” underside of philosophical thinking. The process of philosophical writing, says Derrida, exposes that which has been suppressed or repressed, and covers over that which has been disclosed.
The Rolling Stones