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By Root 699 0

’ music also celebrates the dark side by overturning opposites and revealing what’s beneath, as in: “Just as every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints, As heads is tails, Just call me Lucifer, ’Cause I’m in need of some restraint” (“Sympathy for the Devil”). The Stones’ early music had the effect of deconstructing the pop music of the day by celebrating the R&B roots of rock’n’roll, revealing that which had been oppressed and suppressed by radio programming and had fallen under the influence of white mythology. Pop music had covered over the roots of its origins, just as the abstract philosophical language of concepts had attempted to cover over its hidden roots, found in poetic and metaphoric language. The Beatles-Stones oppositions take on philosophical meaning in this context. “I’ll Follow the Sun” and “Here Comes the Sun” are overturned by the darkness of “Paint It Black,” and “Let It Be” is overturned by “Let It Bleed.”

Dandelions on My Cloud

“Dandelion don’t tell no lies, dandelion will make you wise.” This song presents us with an image of a bright yellow flower, a metaphor for truth and wisdom that many philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries might have appreciated. Rationalists and empiricists may have debated whether reason or the senses were the best avenues to truth, but they agreed that truth, like a bright yellow flower in bloom, was available and plain to see. But in the late 1960s, The Stones’ dandelion and the truth is represents came to an end: “Blow away dandelion.” Under the influence of Derrida and other deconstructionists, the hopeful, optimistic ideals of the Enlightenment began to wither and blow away as doubts arose about the possibility of attaining truth and certainty at all.

But that doesn’t mean truth is altogether blotted out from the sky. The sun, as we have seen, can represent the truth, but a cloud can be my truth. As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) put it, “Truth is subjectivity.”24 For Kierkegaard, truth must be apprehended subjectively and personally in order to be “clearly” understood. Otherwise we see, as St. Paul says, through a glass, darkly. Objective truth must be made subjective and appropriated as a real part of our own experience. As a result, that truth may not be transmitted or shared in a direct way from another person (“Hey, you, get off of my cloud”)—only indirectly in a private and enigmatic way (“Don’t hang around ’cause two’s a crowd”).

Nietzsche tooks things a step further than Kierkegaard by claiming that truth is not merely subjective but impossible. We artistically create our “truth” but then deceive ourselves into believing we have discovered it. What we want, says Nietzsche, is to discover truth, but there is no fixed, objective truth to be found, only various “wills to power” that make these truths. If you want to discover truth, “You can’t always get what you want.” But if you are willing to invent it, and you try, “you just might find you get what you need.”

Back to the Roots (Again)

The Beatles created mythological alter-egos for themselves with the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967. They did so, perhaps, to escape from the confines of their public image as “The Mop Tops” and “The Fab Four.” The Stones responded with their own mythological misadventure, Their Satanic Majesties Request. But doing so took them further out of their element. Although some of the songs from that era, like “She’s a Rainbow” and “Dandelion,” reflect the ethos of the summer of love and the influence of LSD, the Stones had wandered into psychedelia and away from their roots.25 The departure of their manager Andrew Oldham, who had carefully steered their public image away from copying Brian Epstein’s Beatles, left them a bit unfocused and Satanic Majesties turned out to be less than a great success. They needed to get back to where they once belonged.

Beggars Banquet included some driving rock’n’roll, like “Street Fighting Man,” and a return to traditional blues and acoustic guitars with Rev. Wilkins