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It’s rather ironic that The Stones’ tour is called “No Filter” since they’ve decided to self-censor.
In a piece in the Los Angeles Times about the Rolling Stones tour, new music, and the death of drummer Charlie Watts in August, Mikael Wood, the pop music critic at the L.A. Times, asked about the absence of the 1971 classic song, “Brown Sugar” from their current rotation of 80 or so songs.
It seemed to be a strange omission since, according to setlist.fm The Stones have played the song live 1,136 times — second to only “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”
Keith Richards acknowledged that people find the song “problematic” but he’s not sure why and then admits that the band just doesn’t want to deal with the backlash.
In an absurd cop-out, Mick Jagger tried to downplay it as though it’s just a normal thing that a band with such longevity and a massive catalog of hits has to deal with. He added that it’s not just about pleasing fans — it’s also about staying “engaged” in the music.
One song the band seems to have dropped from its set since the tour started up again is “Brown Sugar,” the Stones’ gleefully problematic early-’70s smash that opens on a “Gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields.”
“You picked up on that, huh?” Richards said when asked why they’re not playing the tune. “I don’t know. I’m trying to figure out with the sisters quite where the beef is. Didn’t they understand this was a song about the horrors of slavery? But they’re trying to bury it. At the moment I don’t want to get into conflicts with all of this s—.” He laughed in his signature raspy fashion. “But I’m hoping that we’ll be able to resurrect the babe in her glory somewhere along the track.”
Jagger, as usual, was more circumspect than his freewheeling counterpart. “We’ve played ‘Brown Sugar’ every night since 1970, so sometimes you think, We’ll take that one out for now and see how it goes,” he said. “We might put it back in.” For the frontman, “the set list in a stadium show, it’s kind of a tough one” — all those thousands of people to please while you work to stay engaged yourself in the music.
Source: L.A. Times
Keith Richards wrote in his book “Life” that it was remarkable the way that Jagger wrote the lyrics to the song in one fell swoop, “He wrote it down as fast as he could move his hand. I’d never seen anything like it. He had one of those yellow legal pads, and he’d write a verse a page, just write a verse and then turn the page, and when he had three pages filled, they started to cut it. It was amazing!”
The song is quite clearly a rebuke of chattel slavery that was practiced in the American South prior to the Civil War and the reprehensible acts of rape that were committed by some slaveowners.
It also seems pretty clear that it’s very supportive of black women both individually and as a group. Jagger was dating a black musician, Claudia Linnear, at the time and some say that she the inspiration for the song.
This is what you might call “performative wokeness” — the band members don’t seem to see a problem with the song, but are caving to the wokescolds anyway.
Although, the exception to that might be Jagger who has said that he wouldn’t write the song today. When discussing the song in a 1995 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Jagger said, “I never would write that song now” because it’s “such a mishmash. All the nasty subjects in one go.” Jagger meant the issues of slavery, rape, and the double-entendre of “Brown Sugar” as a reference to heroin.
Piers Morgan writes in the Daily Mail that he’s horribly disappointed by the response by Richards saying that the “words of surrender” from “a man who’s never submitted to anyone about anything” made his “skin crawl.”
Really, Keith?
You no longer have the stomach to stand up for yourself and fight for what’s right?
You were the guy who also co-wrote Street Fighting Man for god’s sake!
How deeply depressing.
Morgan goes on to make a defense for the song.
It’s a song, as Richards says, that highlights the appalling historical reality of slavery, not one that celebrates it.
It depicts female slaves being sold, whipped and raped in America’s south.
Most people know and understand this, not the least the two men who actually wrote it in the first place and who have famously championed black music artists more than any band in history.
In fact, according to Bill Wyman, the song was inspired by a black backing singer named Claudia Linnear who was Jagger’s girlfriend at the time he wrote the song and who did a photo shoot for ‘Playboy’ magazine in 1974 titled ‘Brown Sugar’.
Though another of Jagger’s exes, a black woman named Martha Hunt, later claimed it was about her.
Whatever the truth, Brown Sugar is demonstrably a song aimed at defending and supporting black women, not one that seeks to denigrate them or make light of slavery.
But the woke-fueled narrative will now be that the song IS racist, so the Stones are therefore racist, and they’ve abandoned performing it because they accept these assertions.
What utter nonsense.
Indeed it is, “utter nonsense.”
The new moral and intellectual superiors that make up the “Wokerati” don’t seem to understand art. They also don’t understand nuance or imagery, or literary devices of any sort.
You can see that when they line up to ban “Huckleberry Finn” or “To Kill A Mockingbird” or use the phrase “Uncle Tom” as a pejorative against right-wingers who happen to be black. Maybe they should try reading the books instead of banning them and listening to the what message a song is giving instead of demanding that it be erased from memory.
As Morgan notes, it’s also quite interesting that the Woke Puritans with their torches and pitchforks are going after a 50-year old song when there are more recent songs that are plenty more offensive, especially in one particular genre…
Yet ironically, many rapper lyrics are themselves appallingly racist.
After the death of a teenager at the hands of a Korean store employee in 1991, Ice Cube released a song called Black Korea that contained this lyric: ‘So don’t follow me up and down your market/ Or your little chop-suey ass will be a target/ Of the nationwide boycott/ Juice with the people, that’s what the boy got/So pay respect to the Black fist/ Or we`ll burn your store right down to a crisp/ And then we`ll see ya/ Cause you can’t turn the ghetto into Black Korea.’
The lyrics remain uncensored or edited.
Rappers also spew incredibly offensive lyrics about women.
Snoop Dogg sang: ‘B*itches ain’t sh*t but hoes and tricks, lick on these nuts and suck the d*ck.’
Kanye West sang: ‘I know she like chocolate men, she got more n*ggas off than Cochran.’
Eminem sang: ‘Slut, you think I won’t choke no whore, til the vocal cords don’t work in her throat no more.’
And as for Pharrell Williams’ Blurred Lines collaboration with Robin Thicke, he’s since admitted the lyrics including ‘I hate these blurred lines, I know you want it’ were ‘rapey.’
Source: Daily Mail
Here’s another one for the young, hip, woke cancel culture crowd that they’ve probably never encountered before… get the plank out of your own eye before you look for the speck in your brother’s eye. That’s from the Bible, so it’s unlikely many of them have come across it before.
Here it is in words they might be able to understand…
Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults—unless, of course, you want the same treatment. That critical spirit has a way of boomeranging. It’s easy to see a smudge on your neighbor’s face and be oblivious to the ugly sneer on your own. Do you have the nerve to say, ‘Let me wash your face for you,’ when your own face is distorted by contempt? It’s this whole traveling road-show mentality all over again, playing a holier-than-thou part instead of just living your part. Wipe that ugly sneer off your own face, and you might be fit to offer a washcloth to your neighbor.
Source: Matthew 7: 1-5 (The Message)
