If anyone but The Rolling Stones publicly sang the songs Brown Sugar and Under My Thumb (look up the lyrics), they’d probably be arrested for multiple offences against Equality and Diversity. Do they get away with it because they’re basically thought to be part of the cultural revolution? Or just because they’re rich?
If the past is another country, however, where they do things differently, nowhere is the lacuna between then and now more noticeable than on Rolling Stones songs about rapist murderers, a slaver’s penchant for young African girls (Brown Sugar), and keeping women subservient (Under My Thumb, a fan selection, in which Jagger preens over what nowadays we might call coercive control). That great extended blues, Midnight Rambler, celebrates a rapist as a kind of outlaw, wreaking countercultural vengeance on the smug within their “marble halls”.
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