Blue-collar blues
Rod Liddle says the Rolling Stones’ willingness to be censored at the Superbowl show merely confirms that they were never true revolutionaries
Gold Coast slave ship bound for cotton fields, Sold in the market down in New Orleans, Scarred old slaver knows he’s doin’ alright, Hear him whip the women just about midnight.
And so begins the Rolling Stones’ rousing contribution to the slavery debate and the advancement of understanding between people of all colours, ‘Brown Sugar’. How come you taste so good? Just like a black girl should. Thank you, Mick, for that unique and valuable insight. But don’t bother attending this year’s Mobo awards, huh?
‘Brown Sugar’ is one of the most repellent pop songs ever written, steadfastly amoral, sleazy and explicitly racist. I’ve always liked it enormously, right from the first time I heard it, aged nine or so, when it vied with the Kinks’ magnificent ‘Lola’ — about a man dressed as a lady — as the pop song which most discomfited my parents. ‘Brown Sugar’ was culled from the Rolling Stones’ most steadfastly amoral album, Sticky Fingers, which (unfashionably) I would contest is their finest, with Let It Bleed a close second. They were at their best when enmired in debauchery, drugs and filth: ‘I’ll be in my basement room/ With a needle and a spoon/ And another girl to take the pain away.’ When, aged 15 or so, I experienced what Karl Marx called an ‘explosion of consciousness’, which meant in effect disagreeing with everything my father said about anything, I would play Sticky Fingers very loudly — but close my ears to the stuff which worried me but which I had not yet learnt to call ‘politically incorrect’. The Stones being a rock band that outraged establishment sensibilities, I reassured myself, meant that they were most definitely on my side, the Left — a view to which I still adhered even after a woman from the local Labour party came round to collect my subs one day and departed very quickly because ‘Bitch’ was blaring out of my loudspeakers. But they were not leftwing at all. One of the big misapprehensions about that radical chic counter-culture of the late 1960s and (particularly) early 1970s was that those wonderful, incoherent expressions of wild youth automatically equated with left-wing politics. And we held to this no matter how many times Mick Jagger swanned around in Mustique with the Queen’s sister, watched cricket matches or sang about the joys of whipping black slave girls. It was all a con, of course. Jagger later explained that he’d never been left-wing and had never actually said that he was — and, around about the same time, Neil Young came out for Ronald Reagan, Stokely Carmichael declared himself a Republican and Dylan became a born-again Christian.
So it was no surprise to see the Rolling Stones providing the musical interlude for that ultimate festival of blue-collar, conservative American values, the Superbowl. Mick may have written a slightly sneering song about US neocons recently, but the Stones are nonetheless a quintessentially blue-collar, conservative American band (whatever their north Kent origins). And arguably a better blue-collar American band than anything the Americans have produced, with the possible exception of those madmen from Detroit, the MC5. Nor was it a great surprise that the Yanks censored the Stones, insisting on a five-second broadcasting delay to ensure that nothing too risky and provocative reached the sensitive ears of the nation. Last year, if you remember, the US public was paralytic with outrage when the plainly doolally Janet Jackson flashed a nipple during the very same gig. One whole black nipple! The American public can be frightened by sudden exposure to the mammary gland of a mad black woman, and just as surely they might be terrified beyond redemption if the Stones were suddenly to launch into, say, ‘Short and Curlies’ or ‘Turd on the Run’ instead of the plaintive ‘Angie’ or the maudlin, drippingwet ‘Fool To Cry’. The sad thing is that our boys connived in the censorship. ‘We still have our core values,’ Mick Jagger sniggered after the Superbowl gig, his leathery features wreathed in irony. Well, actually, no you don’t. After all these years it seems reasonable to concede the point that you weren’t ever revolutionary lefties engaged in a battle to overthrow the state. But the real political divide back then was exactly the same as it is now, in retrospect — between authoritarianism and libertarianism. At the time we may have confused it as being between Left and Right, but in reality that young and angry generation merely wished to have sex whenever and with whomsoever they wanted, take as many drugs as they possibly could and allow other people to behave without inhibition or proscription. That is not, in itself, a left-wing credo; but it is a credo of sorts and it is the one to which the Rolling Stones were wedded. Where there is a boundary limiting the rights of an individual to behave in a certain way, we shall break it, regardless of whom it might offend: that was the real manifesto. And, you have to say, regardless of the extremes to which it has subsequently been taken, at the time it was a valuable manifesto.
So by conniving in their own censorship, they have proved themselves to be every bit as quiescent and boring as the most recent crop of young rock bands, those who were lambasted in these very pages a few weeks ago by Brendan O’Neill.
Rock has long since lost its ability to shock or outrage, of course. The appalling pop star Bono, from the appalling U2, is these days afforded the sort of status which was once conferred upon the likes of Henry Kissinger — an eminent and respected envoy to the entire world, jetting hither and thither to divest himself of some faux-humble ill-conceived opinion. Bob Geldof, meanwhile, is advising that bastion of radicalism the Conservative party. The most wacko, obscure, alternative young rock bands find their songs bought up by the advertising agencies for Orange or Vauxhall or Motorola, sometimes before they have even been signed by a label: nothing is outside the hated old ‘system’ any more. Everything is instead subsumed or appropriated by it.
Which is why we should grieve a little for Mick and Keef and their kowtowing to the US establishment. It is one thing to exult in the sexual potential of young African slave girls and entirely another to be transformed into a sort of haggard, arthritic version of Keane or Coldplay for the benefit of a mass American TV audience: the Rolling Stones sanitised and aware of their public responsibilities. Next thing you know they’ll be pleading with us to save the rainforest and taking a stand against bullying by wearing those bloody wristbands. Hell, what’s going on? Give me ‘Brown Sugar’. Give me Marianne Faithfull and a Mars bar. Give me anything but that.
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