The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [77]
The “medieval” aspect of Satanic Majesties is plain in the album’s cover, a cover that is perhaps more “out of character” for the band than anything else about Satanic Majesties. The Stones have replaced The Beatles’ military uniforms with the robes of sorcerers and wrapped the whole idea in the mystery of the original 3-D cover. As you manipulate it, you find all kinds of surprises in its nooks and crannies (including The Beatles, if you hold it right, just as The Stones appear on the cover of Sgt. Pepper). But unlike The Beatles’ cover, there is stuff going on in the sky—a Saturn-like planet and a moon in the upper corner.
These traditional icons of science fiction point to four songs in particular: “Citadel,” “In Another Land,” “2000 Man,” and “2000 Light Years from Home.” “Citadel” is a great rocker, and it’s not surprising that it has been covered by many bands, often with a punk feel. The roaring introductory chords on a very raw-sounding electric guitar completely shatter the tone that had been set by the album opener, “Sing This All Together”—though in fact, unlike with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (the opening song of the album), “Sing” begins and ends with dissonance. The Stones are of course a guitar band, while “Sing” is dominated by piano and horns and a rough “chorus” of vocals. “Sing” immediately tips us off that Satanic Majesties is not going to be a typical Stones album, because of its seemingly silly attempt at a flower-power vibe. But look what happens when “Citadel” comes erupting up out of the (significantly) dissonant sounds at the end. We’re transported from England’s green fields to a Bastille-like prison. This takes us both to “the rusted chains of prison moons” evoked by “In the Court of the Crimson King” (the final song from the album of the same name) and the Marquis de Sade.
“In Another Land,” is built around a dream sequence in which the central fact is holding someone else’s hand. This to me is a utopian image, and also a reminder that, even insomuch as this album deals with “women” (as a category of interest for rock stars), it is different from all other Stones albums. There is no sexism or misogyny here, at least in Mick’s dream. But when he realizes he’s in a dream, and opens his eyes—perhaps to another dream—Jagger delivers one of the best lines of his career: “Is this some kind of joke?” hitting exactly the right note, especially on the last word.
In the final part of “In Another Land,” the dream-within-a-dream turns from utopian to apocalyptic imagery: “We heard the trumpets blow and the sky turned red.” Who then is playing the joke? The feel here anticipates cyberpunk, even The Matrix, or the paranoid feel of Philip K. Dick in which the controlling consciousness is an evil machine (VALIS—the “Vast, Active, Living Intelligent System”). Satanic Majesties thus sings all together with ELP’s Brain Salad Surgery and Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man”—though you would never gather that from reading any standard book about The Stones.
In “2000 Man,” written and sung by Bill Wyman, we encounter an actual computer. Here the two threads tangle and fight each other, as the utopianism of “Sing This All Together” confronts the future. Wyman sings: “I am having an affair with some random computer.” In its science-fiction element and in the way that element is intertwined with the album’s “hippie” and “carnival” themes, The Stones were struggling with this question.