Review: The Rolling Stones’ ‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’
[Art for Whose Sake?]
The duration of the record motion is downward. “Gomper” is a total loss, the instrumental break having nothing whatever to recommend it. The vocal is unbearable. One thing Jagger is not very good at is trying to sound innocent. The cut simply does not cohere and was produced horribly.
By the time we get around to “2000 Light Years From Home” it is possible that even enthusiasts of the sound effects and production gimmicks, and that is what I think they are, will begin to tire of them. The song itself is fine — the drumming holds a comparatively good instrumental track in place — but the continuity is murdered by oscillators and what have you. Jagger just cannot sing consistently well in this kind of restrained voice and his attempts at whispering the line, “It’s so very lonely, you’re two thousand miles from home,” are again embarrassing. He isn’t much as a poser in the image of “teller of truths.”
In a review of Between the Buttons I wrote “The Stones make you feel their presence in a way that is so immediate, so essential, so relevant, that one can’t turn his mind away from what they’re doing.” At the time I believed that the Stones were best of all our white groups, even superior in several respects to the Beatles. And I still think that.
The current album is an obvious detour in which the Stones manifest an understandable insecurity. With everyone getting into seemingly new things and other pop groups cutting huge prestige albums it is reasonable for the Stones to have felt the need to try to say something different, if for no other reason than to please their friends and the cultists.
Unfortunately they have been caught up in the familiar dilemma of mistaking the new for the advanced. In the process they have sacrificed most of the virtues which made their music so powerful in the first place: the tightness, the franticness, the directness, and the primitiveness.
It is largely a question of intent. The old Stones had the unstated motto of “We play rock.” And there was always an overriding aura of competence which they tried to generate. They knew they did their thing better than anyone else around, and, in fact, they did. The new Stones have been too infused with the pretentions of their musical inferiors. Hence they have adopted as their motto “We make art.” Unfortunately, in rock there seems to be an inverse ratio between the amount of striving there is to make art and the quality of the art that results. For there was far more art in the Rolling Stones who were just trying to make rock than there is in the Rolling Stones who are trying to create art. It is an identity crisis of the first order and it is one that will have to be resolved more satisfactorily than it has been on Their Satanic Majesties Request if their music is to continue to grow.