What a Drag It Is Gettin' Old

By Nick Gillespie, Reason. Posted June 27, 2002.

Few things are more self-evidently embarrassing than the last 25 years of music produced by the world's greatest and most arthritic rock band, the Rolling Stones -- a group whose 2002 world tour will doubtless be the first to be cosponsored by Depends and Viagra and whose audience will largely consist of dead pool bettors hoping to cash in on the precise moment that Keith Richards is officially pronounced as deceased.

Indeed, who can seriously argue that the Stones, for all their past and undeniable glory, have even come close to releasing an album that matters since 1978's Some Girls? Given their output since then, one doubts that even the wine-drinking Puerto Rican girls who figured so scandalously in that LP's best-known track, "Miss You," are still just dyin' to meet them.

Yet if something can be more cringe-inducing than years of sonic bombs such as 1980's Emotional Rescue, 1986's Dirty Work, and 1997's Bridges to Babylon, it's surely the news that Mick Jagger will be knighted by rock's newly unmasked number one groupie, Queen Elizabeth II. (To be fair, the Cavalier-like Jagger, the father of seven children by four different women and a key player in various naughty urban legends featuring candy bars and same-sex couplings, has always acted as if he were a member of the decadent court of King Charles II.)

His receiving an official title from the queen is, like the recent star-studded Golden Jubilee concert in her honor, simply the latest sign that the once potent countercultural force known as "rock" has been every bit as domesticated as satanist cum sitcom-patriarch Ozzy Osbourne. Was it really only a quarter-century ago that the Sex Pistols gloriously, censoriously, questioned the very humanity of that same queen?

Call it the Death of Rock. Or, more precisely, the death of rock's pretensions to Dionysian excess and subversive power, once widely understood to be its very raison d'être. It may never have been particularly true, but since rock's emergence as a self-conscious, if always ill-defined, category in the mid-1950s, fans and foes alike could agree that the form is somehow a challenge to the status quo. As Frank Sinatra memorably put it in 1957, rock "is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons. By means of its almost imbecilic reiteration it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth." Exactly. And therein lies its great and enduring appeal.

Rock -- a loose term that designates at best an inchoate impulse or sensibility in certain popular music -- provides not only a youthful outlet against adults, but a forum where musical genres and traditions mingle promiscuously and often ridiculously; it creates a psychic location in which race, class, and gender lines can be dangerously blurred and overridden with wanton, hedonistic, and adolescent delight for kids of all ages. This potential reached full flower for the first time in the '60s, the first decade in which rock fully dominated the pop landscape. Not coincidentally, the '60s ushered in an age in which rock performers were fetishized and demonized as dangerously liberatory and messianic.

Few major bands played to this perception more so than the Stones, and arguably no individual more successfully than Jagger himself (his main competitor might have been Jim Morrison, who had the good grace, like the athlete dying young, to expire at age 27, thereby saving his fans from inevitable disappointment). Incapable of getting satisfaction, Jagger was nonetheless insatiable, a demonic street-fighting man who presided with some disturbing but undeniable dark delight over the carnage at Altamont. Most interesting, because most disturbing, the twitchy, bitchy Jagger never promised any sort of political or moral uplift; rather, he promised only to debauch himself and whoever he was with, to push the limits of human excess and degradation. He was the type of drinking buddy around whom you never wanted to pass out for fear of what he might do to you. The infamous story about Mick, Marianne Faithfull, and the Mars bar may well be false, but with Jagger, it's not only believable -- you almost want it to be true.

When listening to the Stones' great rival from the '60s, the Beatles, you can rest assured that things would never ultimately get out of control, that the Fab Four's relentless aesthetic judgment and good taste would prevail, that in the end, everything was gonna be alright. At their best, which is to say their most decadent and sinister, the Stones never offered their fans any such safe harbor (it's no surprise that their worst music in the '60s came when they pathetically tried to ape the Beatles). Rather, they served up sheer pleasure so intense that it became unnerving and offered no justification other than to proclaim that it's only rock 'n' roll. That's one of the reasons why, rare for a big '60s act, the Stones segued relatively easily into the decadent, androgynous '70s, releasing as many (or arguably, more) great and outrageous albums in that decade (Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street, Goat's Head Soup, It's Only Rock 'n' Roll, and Some Girls) as in the one before. It's no accident that that ultimate square, Allan Bloom, singled out Jagger in The Closing of the American Mind as the sine qua non of everything that was diseased in youth culture.

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