The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [51]
At first glance, it looks as if the answer is clear. The music of The Rolling Stones reflects Cyrenaic hedonism. Time and again, The Stones seem to celebrate the unbridled indulgence of physical pleasures. One would think, since the songs tell us to be Cyrenaics, that The Stones’ music could be understood as reflecting Cyrenaic hedonism as the moral path most likely to lead to happiness. But a closer look suggests that The Stones’ most hedonistic songs are more about agonizing desire and unfulfilled pleasures, rather than the achievement of happiness through pleasurable indulgence. If this is the case, it could turn out that it’s a mistake to understand The Stones as recommending Cyrenaic hedonism as the road to happiness.
Now I Need You More than Ever
The Stones’ lyrics tell us that, sometimes, seeking pleasure can cause physical pain. In “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” from the 1967 album Between the Buttons, Jagger describes his bodily sufferings as he attempts to convince a woman to consent to the sexual pleasure he desires. “I’m going red and my tongue’s getting tied / I’m off my head and my mouth’s getting dry.” While the physical manifestations of sexual desire are familiar not only to hedonists, if one’s sole interest in a particular person is sexual satisfaction, pain at the denial of that satisfaction would be keenly felt.
More dramatically, “Sister Morphine” on Sticky Fingers describes the physical state of someone who has long enjoyed the intense pleasure of morphine and cocaine. Nearing death, he (or she, as the song was first written and recorded by Marianne Faithfull) is so weak he cannot even drag himself across the floor in pursuit of one last hit of the drugs that are killing him. If these two songs are representative, it seems the Epicureans are correct: pleasures can sometime bring serious pain along with them—pain so bad, it can end up being worse than the goodness of the pleasure that is initially sought.
I’m Shattered
The Stones’ lyrics also point to psychological pain and trauma resulting from continually grappling for pleasures. Take Flashpoint’s 1991 song, “Sex Drive.” “I got this sex drive / Driving me mad.” Rather than experiencing pleasure, it looks as if the pursuit of pleasure is leading to pain, as it does in “Shattered” on Some Girls: “Laughter, joy and loneliness and sex and sex and sex and sex /Look at me, I’m in tatters!”
One of the songs in which the desperation and the failure to reach happiness through pleasure is most evident is “Undercover of the Night,” where descriptions of various horrors—street violence, forced prostitution, unjustified, racially-motivated imprisonments by corrupt governments—are juxtaposed against an anguished pleading chorus begging for a hedonistic escape from these horrors, “Cuddle up, baby / Keep it all out of sight.” But the plan doesn’t work. At the end of the song we learn that the attempt to keep the desperation “undercover” fails: “All these things I can’t keep inside” (Undercover, 1983).
Can You Always Get What You Want?
The Stones’ muse is often the pain that results from the unbridled pursuit of pleasure, just as Epicurus warned. But, has this given us enough reason to reject Cyrenaic hedonism? One reason why someone might experience pain at the headlong pursuit of pleasure that would not count against Cyrenaic skepticism is that the pain is simply the result of failing to achieve the pleasure. If the pain described by The Stones is pain caused by the inability to attain a particular pleasure, rather than pain stemming from the pleasure itself, then the problem is not with the Cyrenaics’ method, but simply with the individual who doesn’t achieve the pleasure he seeks. In this case, the Epicurean recommendation to focus on simple, easy to achieve pleasures looks like a good one. The question is, can inability to attain