I started listening to Sticky Fingers again, today. I think I got about 15 seconds into “Brown Sugar”; into Bill Wyman’s thumping, cathartic bassline, into Jagger’s wolverine, untethered yowl. And then it hit me.
At some point, during Sticky Fingers, cognitive dissonance sets in. “Brown Sugar” is a song about a romantic escapade with a young girl. It gallops along with incredible force, almost a fury of energy. Keith Richards’ chords and intervals, while immediate and approachable, are vaguely jazzy, free of the confinement of mimicry and convention.
Sticky Fingers is like a rolling iceberg, on which some catch surface, and ride it like a wave, and under which others are crushed, devastated. Nobody is in between. And for years, for all of eternity, in the minds of men, behind blurry, world-denying eyes, behind huge, obfuscatory bears, behind loud, petulant and ostentatious personalities, the greatness of Sticky Fingers will be denied. Mick Jagger will be made out to be a creep, like Anthony Kiedis. They’ll be made out to be egomaniacs, artistic thieves, libertines, and perhaps even overly conventional, in some sectors, by certain parties decidedly deaf to the fast-food-jingle reality of contemporary mainstream music today, as it were.
It’s not that I’m not interested in listening to the remainder of Sticky Fingers. It’s that there’s no point. It’s redundant. There will always be bitter scabs out there professing hatred for The Rolling Stones. And there will be always bitter scabs out there, in bars, in grocery stores, on the street, on the other line of the phone with you, in the homeless shelters, in the jails and prisons, people who have to be a problem, people who were crushed under the wave of golden era rock and roll, people paralyzed by seismic jealousy, people whose fingers are scented vaguely with a solution scientifically proven to prevent schizophrenia, splitting duties between aged saline and trendy emptiness.
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