The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [57]
Existential Exile
As for existential exile, take “Sweet Black Angel,” track 8 in which Mick sings about Angela Davis, the philosophy professor imprisoned in 1970 and charged (but found innocent) in the murder of a judge by black panthers. She’s “a pin up girl,” known in the Seventies for her hair and her good looks—but “she ain’t no singer, and she ain’t no star.” Mick and Keith sing for her freedom as she’s “counting up the minutes” and “counting up the days.” In calling her “a sweet black slave,” they compare the “chains” of her imprisonment and the larger shadow of slavery in America.
Phair’s response, the eerie and beautiful “Canary,” sounds entirely different. She plays piano quietly and simplistically, suggesting a very different sonic landscape (compared to the uptempo country of “Sweet Black Angel”) in which to make a very different point about exile and imprisonment. Putting herself in a cage “like a good canary,” Phair transforms the chains of Davis’s prison cell into the chains of the formal education of a proper young girl in tony Winnetka, Illinois:
I learn my name
I write with a number two pencil
I work up to my potential
I earn my meat
I come when called.
Different scenarios follow in later verses, all of which lead Phair to contemplate her own act of domestic terrorism: “Send it up on fire, death before dawn.”
Mick and Liz: Partners in Crime?
These are only a few examples, but they illustrate how nearly all of Phair’s songs can be compared with their counterparts on Main Street and seen as a “response.” (Phair’s responses to the other songs are described briefly at the end of this chapter.) At the same time, though, Phair’s Guyville is no hermeneutical exercise or game, like a musical sudoku or crossword puzzle. On top of all this song-by-song dialogue and clever conversation she creates with Main Street, there is an undeniable personal and emotional investment. There are clues, scattered across Guyville, that Phair is not just a songwriting woman walking down Main Street with Mick and Keith and comparing notes about exile. Instead, she is the woman, or all of the women, whom they praise, seduce, and argue with over the course of their album.
In “Tumbling Dice,” Mick says he’s “playing the field every night” but being worn down by the women who are “always trying to waste” him. They demand too much of him, he complains. And they are always “bitchin’” about his behavior. Not Phair, whose “Never Said” responds by taking the high, quiet road about some secret rendezvous. If she and Mick had ever been “partners in crime”—or if, in the language of “Loving Cup,” she had been the one Mick wanted to “spill the beans with” all night—Phair never spilled the beans about spilling the beans. Or, in her words, “I didn’t let the cat out.”
As for what might have transpired, listen to Phair’s declaration of lust, “Flower,” itself a response to Mick’s ode to “the bedroom blues” in “Let It Loose.” Phair’s methodical description of her lover’s anatomy lingers on his lips. They are, she says, “a perfect suck-me size.” His lips, of course, go with his tongue, and that’s what takes the spotlight in her song “Glory,” Phair’s response to “Shake your Hips.” Where Mick focuses on a woman’s hips (and not “your head,” “your hands,” or “your lips”—“ just your hips”), Phair is enthralled by some guy with a “really big tongue.” “It rolls way out” and sends her into a glorious reverie.
Now this rings a hermeneutic bell, because Jagger’s are the most famous lips and tongue in rock. They became a logo for the band in 1971 when he commissioned artist Jim Pasche to design some artwork. Meeting with Jagger made the job easy: “Face to face with him,” Pasche said, “the first thing you were aware of was the size of his lips and his mouth.”37 It’s hard to believe, therefore,