The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [59]
My point is not that Phair misread the song, but rather that Phair is actively reading the song (as anyone does) and constructing an interpretation that is true to her situation and interests. Guyville opens a window on this cascade of interpretations: There’s Mick’s take on the self-abusive rock-star life in “Rocks Off,” Phair’s take on Mick’s take (which is doubly informed by her crush on Nash Kato), my take on Phair’s take on Mick’s take. It’s interpretations—impressionistic, malleable, and reviseable—all down the line.
Exile from Ancient Greece—Yeah!
An obvious objection is the familiar cry of anti-relativist fundamentalists who put albums like Main Street in a pantheon of absolute, unchanging greatness. They scoff at the very idea that its meaning or importance has something to do with what Liz Phair thinks, or what I think. Exile on Main Street doesn’t need to be interpreted, they’ll say, because its greatness and importance is self-explanatory. Just listen to it!
But the self-explanatory claim is self-defeating: if the meanings and ideas in Exile on Main Street having nothing to do with what Liz Phair thinks, they don’t have anything to do with what anti-relativist fundamentalists think, either. And I doubt any serious Stones fan wants to go there. If Main Street speaks to you, that means you’re listening to it and you are involved in determining what you are hearing.
Neither The Rolling Stones, nor their fans, nor Liz Phair’s fans were looking for some kind of philosophical enlightenment on this, but that’s part of what Guyville offers. For while most commentators and critics were making light of Phair’s claim, as if she had no idea what she was talking about, her song-by-song claim turns out to be no mere gimmick: it speaks volumes about how we listen to and think about music that, so far as I can see, are correct and important.
Look again at the near-universal bewilderment over her claim. When they heard that Phair’s great new album was a “song-by-song response” to Exile on Main Street, what do you suppose was the hermeneutical starting point of all these skeptics ? What did they suppose that claim meant? Most likely, they presumed that Guyville’s songs were going to sound like the songs on Main Street. When they didn’t, the indie rock world shrugged its shoulders and figured the confusion was Phair’s, not theirs.
The mistake is not new. Since Plato and Aristotle, we’ve tended to assume that artistic or intellectual inspiration inevitably involves some kind of imitation. What it means to understand the beauty of a statue, Aristotle would say, involves your mind actually containing a copy or representation of its shape and contours; what it means to study astronomy—among the most exalted human activities for Plato—is to establish mathematically precise and elegant harmonies in your thoughts that mirror those of the celestial bodies overhead. So, when Phair announced that her new album was an answer to Exile on Main Street, listeners probably assumed that Guyville would be some kind of imitation of that classic album.
Yet to understand her song-by-song response, you have to jettison this prejudice that inspiration means imitation as well as the non-hermeneutical metaphysics of art that goes along with it. This is no small maneuver, for the history of pop music has been in large part a celebration of imitation and pretense. When The Stones first started playing, their goal was to imitate the sounds and words that blew them away on records by Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, and other blues artists. But they became the world’s greatest rock’n’roll band by later cultivating a sound and sensibility that was all their own.
It’s a long way from the sockhop of “Around and Around,” which Mick and Keith did not write, to the social