The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [99]
However, if falling in love with Ronnie Bennett is just the inevitable by-product of having a soul watching her sing, then, as a window into their conscious affiliation with the Black cultural experience, consider The Stones’ motive for writing “Sweet Black Angel,” whose lyrics include:
She countin’ up de minutes, She countin’ up de days,
She’s a sweet black angel, woh, Not a sweet black slave.
…
Now de judge he gonna judge her For all dat he’s worth.
Written for Exile on Main Street a few years before Fordyce, “Sweet Black Angel” was an overtly political song about the imprisonment and prosecution of Angela Davis, a black feminist philosopher and civil rights activist.
Inspired by Muddy Waters, the Stones were the musical embodiment of a white-black synthesis. Entranced by and at home in Black juke joints and outcasts at white truck stops, the Stones were an aesthetic and cultural manifestation of racial integration. Richards in love with Ronnie Bennett, was a romantic and sexual enactment of racial mixing. Eventually writing a song in solidarity with Angela Davis and civil rights, the Stones became a political voice of racial injustice. The fear of The Stones’ embodiment of these racial, sexual, and political dimensions was reflected in the Arkansas laws and in the psychology at work in their arrest.
Keith Richards the Prophet
Richards’s Arkansas arrest serves as a leading clue to a philosophical question—what is law? The question concerning the definition of law stops being merely factual and starts being philosophical when we realize how the general rules in print, such as Arkansas statues, fail to map-on to the specific conduct sanctioned by the letter of the law in a one-to-one correspondence.
Statutes and regulations are inevitably more general than any particular action that might or might not fall under their purview. So the law involves the art of judgment; that is, legal authorities must determine which instances fall under the general rule, or which general legal principle to apply to a specific case at hand. That there are legislated statues that prohibit misconduct is straightforward enough: reckless driving is illegal. Deciding which specific ways of driving (such as spinning up gravel outside an Arkansas restaurant) is to be counted as reckless is where the rock meets the roll, where the art of judgment come into play. This particular judicial decision of what specific acts fall under the more generally written statute is what matters to those of us, British rockers or not, who want to avoid the long arm of the law.
Some theorists, such as John Austin in his The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, define law as a function of political power. For Austin, a law is a command from a political superior to a political inferior imposing a duty to obey and backed by a sanction for disobeying. Austin’s definition places the primacy of law in the legislative branch of government. So the Arkansas state legislators serve on committees and try to draft laws making rock’n’roll illegal. According to Austin, these laws impose duties on us inferiors, and we are penalized for disobeying them. Austin and other legal positivists (the superiors posit the laws), thought that law and morality were separate matters. Legislators write statutes in an effort to transform social practices in accord with some ideal, but, according to this legal philosophy, they do not conceive their laws as embodying or participating in some higher, say divine, morality.
However, the definition of law that most helps us understand Richards’ predicament in Fordyce comes from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Holmes agreed with the positivists that in order to understand the law, we need to set aside questions of morality. Moral duties, according to Holmes, were the limitations upon our actions by conscience or some ideal. But legal duties cannot be understood independently