The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [84]
The Rolling Stones are a cosmic essence, a Platonic Form, of rock music. The Beatles started as classicists, and soon went through mannerist, baroque, and rococo stages of aesthetic decadence. I think that one reason for their break-up—whatever women or ego-inflations were involved—was that they had reached an aesthetic dead end; there was nowhere else their actual talents or direction could take them. Soon they would have been writing symphonies and fantasias and operas, and then their artistic limitations would have been even more excruciating in relation to their ambitions than they were already. The Stones actually had their moments of trying to ape the developments instituted by the late Beatles, replying to the psychedelic Sgt. Pepper with their own quasi-psychedelic Their Satanic Majesties Request, for example. Brian Jones tried to learn the sitar before getting kicked to the curb.
But the fundamental impulse was always to strip to the essence of the rock song. Where The Beatles added layer after layer of instrumental and lyrical ornament, Keith Richards tried to find the absolute essence of the rock guitar lick, on “Satisfaction,” “Brown Sugar,” “She’s So Cold.” Finally on a late song like “Gunface” he stripped the thing down to a single incredibly alive chord. The Stones return again and again to the sources of their own music in the blues, in country, in soul. They have both celebrated these basic structures and pushed them forward.
One might be less than blown away by Mick Jagger the lyricist : there’s a lot of celebration of the supposed hyper-sexuality of black girls, for instance. But there are also many interesting twists and fresh departures, displayed above all on The Stones’ surprising moments of beauty and reflection: “Wild Horses,” for example, or “Beast of Burden”: songs that display an admirable artistry and sensitivity even in the midst of a reversion to roots. (There are even reflections on being an aging rock star: “I was a hooker losing her looks / I was a writer can’t write another book / I was all dried up dying to get wet / I was a tycoon drowning in debt”: from “You Got Me Rockin’”). And one thing we can say for Jagger: he did not write “Glass Onion.” The art of The Rolling Stones has developed in the ways that traditional arts develop: by simultaneously nurturing the roots and pushing into the sky.
As Plato conceived his Forms, they were not things invented by himself or other philosophers; they were things that were both remembered and discovered, or that were discovered by being remembered: they were essences that were our origin and our destiny. The Stones both remembered and discovered the essence of rock music. They reverted continually to the origin, but they also stripped away the accretions. Their songs pushed forward by seeking the basis; they moved toward a center that we might associate with Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, or Little Richard, and then they exposed that center. They showed the center of that center.
Once The Beatles had stopped touring, once The Beatles had stopped making rock music, and after The Beatles broke up, The Stones stopped trying to imitate them or compete directly with them. Once the did, they made a series of roughly perfect albums: Beggar’s Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main Street. I propose that this sequence of albums just is rock music: its very essence, the definition of the form. Discovering the essence of what you’re doing is of course only one way of making art. Departing from that essence in various directions—experimentation, originality, innovation—these procedures have certainly yielded important works of art. And yet the achievement of one’s own essence is also a legitimate aesthetic project. It has never been achieved in popular music with more dedication, more focus, or more power in than in