Music Monday: The Ballad of 'Brown Sugar'
The Stones Dropped the Song from their Play Lists for Their Just-Concluded Tour
The Rolling Stones will not be playing “Brown Sugar” live any longer. The reasons why depends on which band member you ask. Mick Jagger told The Los Angeles Times that it was just time.
“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.”
Keith Richards, however, offered this take:
"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 sh**," he said. "But I'm hoping that we'll be able to resurrect the babe in her glory somewhere along the track."
“Brown Sugar” opens Sticky Fingers, the first Stones’ record of the ‘70s, and part of a remarkable four-album run that concludes with the unparalleled Exile on Main Street, a record created out of chaos and that offers a summation of the Stones’ sound and vision to that point. Sadly, what came after often fell into caricature, despite their being many great songs, and the band would only occasionally find its earlier stride.
“Brown Sugar” remains one of my favorite songs, but it always has left me feeling a bit queazy. The song opens with the voyage of a slave ship and sale of Blacks in New Orleans, before quickly moving to the plantation and a the whipping of the enslaved women ”just around midnight” by the slaver who “know he's doin' all right,” and the repeated refrain: “Brown Sugar, how come you taste so good? / Brown Sugar, just like a young girl should, oh no.”
The juxtaposition implies rape, the repetition and the driving rhythm of the song strip it of the horror Richards claims is there, is inherent in the song — especially when followed by a series of verses set elsewhere in which servants and others are dancing, partying, and fucking “just around midnight.”
The propulsive rhythm, established with the opening staccato blasts from Richards’ guitar, makes this song a defining rock moment, and evidence of the band at its peak. The song is both party and power struggle, a declaration of the time’s hedonism and a hard-edged bit of blues, the ugly and amazing played out in a 3-minute, 50-second span.
This is not unusual in popular music. There are dozens, hundreds of songs that we have as part of the pop and rock canons that glorify the ugly aspects of our nature. As I write this, Little Walter comes on, singing “Boom Boom, Out Go the Lights,” a song covered by Pat Travers. The song is similar to “Hey Joe,” which is a classic of the blues-rock genre most famously recorded by Jimi Hendrix, in that it focuses on violence against women from the mail point of view, in many ways justifying it and glamorizing it.
It would be easy to view “Brown Sugar” and many of these songs as ironic, as satirical, as critique. That is the argument Richards has made — that it is a “song about the horrors of slavery,” that the band’s intentions were pure, and that critiques are based on a misreading of the lyrics. This argument is consistent with something the legendary rock critic Lester Bangs once said about the Stones: The band approached its music with a sense of irony, a bit of tongue in cheek. If he is right, then the defenses made by the Stones of some of their more problematic lyrics make sense.
And yet, for irony to be effective as a literary tool, we have to be prepared for it. If not, the satire involved must be so over the top that we can’t help but get it.
I think of Jonathan Swift calling for the rich to eat poor Irish children as a way of addressing poverty, a proposal so absurd it should be obvious he offers it as a metaphor for the way the rich in Great Britain treated the destitute in Ireland.
Examples of this kind of ironic approach in popular music abound, but the one that stands out for me is “Delia” by Johnny Cash, which is sung in the persona of a murder who is in love with his victim and tells a story that seems to jump right from a script for “Criminal Minds.” Cash sings in a touching, loving manner, opening simply by repeating the title-victim’s name, before shattering the illusion that this will be a love song and making clear something is amiss: “If I hadn't shot poor Delia / I'd have had her for my wife.” The song then unfolds in a series of disturbing details — he tied her to a chair the first time they meet, then blames her for being “low down and mean.” Throughout, Cash maintains the song’s love-song tone. The song is both love song and murder ballad, a merger of two traditional forms, and deeply ironic. We want to empathize with the singer, because it is a love song sung in Cash’s familiar bass-baritone voice, but we can’t, because the details keep intruding, the ugliness of the situation keeps announcing itself, because the singer/speaker’s love is a perversion of the emotion. Just as important, the singer/narrator ends in jail. Colton Wall’s “Kate McCannon” plays out in a similar way, with the punishment clearly indicated as part of the murder ballad, making clear what the Stones and Little Walter do no.
Songs like “Brown Sugar” fail this irony test, but still possess a magnetic pull, the Stones finding a pocket driven by guitar and perhaps the greatest rhythm duo in rock history, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman. “Brown Sugar” is one of dozens of songs that cross a lyrical line, where the misogyny is clear. Still we listen. And I think we should. Art is not meant to be comfortable or neat. And it is not meant to offer moral guidance or an education in how we should live in the world. The way we engage with songs like “Brown Sugar” and the dozens that are far more graphic and hurtful is not to “cancel” them, to use the current parlance, but to engage with them. To listen, to critique, to point out their flaws, their brutalities, and to challenge them.