The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [76]
But I Like It. Even though my own tastes go toward experimentalism and away from “blues orthodoxy,” given the choice of listening to either Sgt. Pepper or Satanic Majesties, I would happily choose the latter. And that is because, even though Sgt. Pepper is undoubtedly really good, great even, as a musical work, and not only in itself but because of all the doors that it opened up, as an actual listening experience Satanic Majesties is really cool (whether that’s a valid category in philosophical aesthetics, it should be).
I don’t necessarily disagree with Stones fans who overlook the album. It has plenty of flaws. It’s derivative—a knock-off within the field of what can be called “Pepperisms.” And it’s a departure from what most Stones fans expect from a Stones album. Philosophers like Alain Badiou argue that every philosopher and every artist has, at most, one great idea to contribute. Certainly this could be said of The Stones, their idea being a combination of blues and rock—something that Satanic Majesties is not.
The album is also kind of sloppy. Perhaps “lackadaisical” is the word, and the criticism hinges on being able to distinguish between just letting things go musically and seeing what happens—running a musical experiment, in other words—and not pulling things together as well as they should be. Of course The Beatles (and George Martin) excelled at pulling things together in this way. If the The Beatles are T.S. Eliot, The Stones are more Allen Ginsberg and his ‘first thought, best thought’ school of writing poetry. With Ginsberg and The Stones, you don’t get the good stuff without all of the surrounding mess; and some of the best stuff is right on the edge of being a mess. While Sgt. Pepper has “edge” in places, it is not “edgy,” as is Satanic Majesties. Perhaps you have to have the “mess” in order to also have the feeling that there is something wild and untamable that is about to burst through your speakers or headphones, and that at some points does burst through. (Perhaps these are the moments when “really cool” as an aesthetic category starts to mean really good or even great.) Even so, there are many moments with Satanic Majesties where it seems as if the band could have pulled things together a bit more.
In the Court of the Satanic Majesty
The Stones were no strangers to other manifestations of Pepperism in popular culture. While the debate raged over just how much experimentalism rock music could bear, Jagger himself was a part of cinematic experiments undertaken by Nicholas Roeg and Kenneth Anger.39 And at the historic Hyde Park concert in 1969 to commemorate the life and sudden death of Brian Jones, one of the opening bands was King Crimson who delivered what was by all accounts a mind-blow-ing performance. While Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King would become a classic of experimental and progressive rock, The Stones’ ragged performance at this concert pointed to the turn they would soon take—away from Pepperism and back to the blues that was, and remains, the band’s first and guiding love.
Yet, for all that, Satanic Majesties can and should be seen as a great Stones album. In fact, it should be understood as The Stones’ only album in so far as it really strives, following Sgt. Pepper, to stand as more than a collection of independent songs unified only by the period in which they were written, the sound the producers and engineers were going for, the kinds of guitars (or drugs) Keith was using, or the women in The Stones’ lives. Let it be said: Satanic Majesties is not only a concept album, it’s a concepts album that prog rock fans, as well as Stones fans, should pay attention to.
Beelzebub’s Bugged-Out Bequest
Thematically, there are two threads that run through Satanic Majesties. One, a hippie-utopian theme, has much in common with Sgt. Pepper and other Pepperist efforts of the time. The other is science fiction. Perhaps because science fiction in late-1960s creative rock music is so emblematic of progressive rock, it has remained obscure in the case of The Stones.