Not that it needs a historical plaque, but it's been exactly 25 years since John Strausbaugh published the book Rock 'Til You Drop: The Decline from Rebellion to Nostalgia. Lamenting the rise of or lapse into what he managed to call "colostomy rock" Strausbaugh's publisher put a sweaty Mick Jagger on the cover and timed the release to coincide with the end of what Strausbaugh called the "steel wheelchairs tour," following the album Steel Wheels.
"In the 1960s and early 70s rock and rebellion went arm in arm," read Strausbaugh's cover copy. "This was the generation that angrily refused to grow up, to settle down. The Who captured the zeitgeist with precision: ‘I hope I die before I get old.’ Yet, thirty years later, many of the icons of rock and roll’s angry childhood are not only still alive but continue to haul themselves up on stage, limping through old standards with performances that have lost all edge and meaning."
That's brutal, and it arrived at a time when, shockingly enough, a last-gasp revival of Stones-like blues rock was arising, driven by the likes of the Strokes, White Stripes, and the Black Keys. They had the youthful swagger that a middle-aged Strausbaugh seemed to demand. On the other hand, they eventually kind of petered out too, though Jack White put out a rocking new album 10 days ago, on the same new morning that the Stones issued their album Foreign Tongues. The Strokes and the Black Keys are also back, even if they haven’t undergone colostomies.
Just to get the review out of the way: Foreign Tongues is so damn good. I liked the last one, Hackney Diamonds, but this is considerably better.
As is well known, the Stones issued four albums from 1968 to 1972—Beggar's Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main St.—that defined the genre of rock 'n’ roll and expressed it most perfectly. The period was the high point of the genre as a whole, when rock captured or was the zeitgeist. And this zeitgeist was self-consciously young. It was rebellious, we might say, though not as a whole directly revolutionary. It included the Grateful Dead, The Beatles' last gasp, the arrival of Led Zeppelin, Woodstock, and so on. It appeared almost ineffably connected to hopeful social movements for peace and equality.
I say “ineffably,” because the Stones or even the Dead weren't exactly singing about that. They wanted to preserve and expand the vocabularies of blues and country music. "Sympathy for the Devil" might’ve mentioned the Kennedy assassination, but it was more concerned with the blues and hence rock as “the devil's music” and the sexy persona of Jagger than the civil rights movement. Lots of the artists that get age-baited in Strausbaugh's treatment couldn’t be considered rebels by any stretch. Rock has gotten to a sad place, he says, when "Cher makes her umpteenth comeback, and Yes grind out their old standards to punters at gambling resorts." But Cher and Yes weren't exactly the Weather Underground.
Anyway, the Stones put out amazing music before their perfect run of four albums, like the material on the albums The Rolling Stones, Now! and Aftermath. And they have put out a number of great albums, and dozens of great songs since, on still underappreciated albums such as Emotional Rescue, Undercover, and A Bigger Bang. In a way, everything after the run had to be an anti-climax, and it's stretching out to decades now. Few artists get multiple moments of perfection, and the role that rock music played in world culture in 1970 can never happen again. That's alright. Social movements disintegrated or succeeded. Disco arrived, and punk, and hip-hop. The rock moment was over.
But the genre persisted. It persists the way the blues persists, or jazz, or even country, or disco, or old-school hip-hop. Genres of popular music, if they’re fortunate, get a decade or two of dominance. How long did the swing era last? It hit hard in the mid-1930s and kept going for a decade. But the young lindy-hoppers and race traitors aged. The musicians got a little bored and started gathering after hours to play bop. The economics and the technologies shifted, and few could afford to take a 50-piece band on the road.
But swing persisted as a permanent possibility, an addition to musical vocabularies. It underwent many revivals, even in the 1990s on the charts with bands like the Cherry Poppin Daddies. On a good day, it still sounds great, and it will always flash people back in imagination to its own era and serve as the soundtrack for historical fictions and documentaries.
Whatever boomer dudes would like to think, rock is a genre of popular music. I know it sounds crazy, but the Stones were signed to a major distribution and publishing deal and were trying to sell records. They experimented as they went along with other genres, including disco, punk, reggae, and hip-hop, all of which are folded into Foreign Tongues. They were never purists. They’re entertainers and craftsmen: if Keith Richards once compared the blues to a chair, these guys turn out beautiful, handmade furniture. I think one should do that for as long as one can.
The rock sounds fresh again right now, but the Stones have never pretended not to be aging. In 1994, even before Strausbaugh started pressuring them to quit, Jagger was giving us stuff like this ("You Got Me Rocking" from Voodoo Lounge):
I was a hooker, losing her looks
I was a writer, can't write another book
I was all dried up, dying to get wet
I was a tycoon, drowning in debt
Now "you," no doubt "she," got Jagger rocking again, but the point is the frank acknowledgment that this is not 1972. The acknowledgment is all over Foreign Tongues, for example on "Side Effects," a song which slots right into their greatest, somewhere between "Beast of Burden" and "Can You Hear Me Knocking." Also, the concept of side effects has the cultural meaning now that LSD had in 1969. It's everywhere, man.
The whole album acknowledges this period in their lives and ours. And nails or crushes it on items like "Mr. Charm" or "Hit Me in the Head." On "Never Want to Lose You," again a worthy addition to a Stones Top 20, Jagger sings:
Gold dust through my fingers
Watched it pour away
Money, blood and treasure
Where it's gone, I just can't say
Snapshots in my shoebox
Friends I can't recall
Pollocks and Picassos curling up
And falling off my kitchen wall.
That Picassos and Pollocks are curling up and falling off Jagger's kitchen wall: I find this oddly plausible.
There are echoes on Foreign Tongues of every style and every moment of their careers (back to country honk on "Ringing Hollow," for example, and back to falsetto vocals on "Jealous Lover"). I'd say it's a valedictory statement, but now I don't put it past them to just keep going. It has to end sometime, of course. But it’s going strong right now, which means that rock music is alive. (It's alive again every time Keith hits one of those chords not quite on the beat.)
Rock can't be what Strausbaugh experienced circa '72. Maybe no genre can be that now. But at any time and by definition a youth rebellion has a limited lifespan, which might be shorter than the lifespan of a master musician. Many rockers, including the Stones' Brian Jones, did die before they got old. Others played casinos or bopped 'til they dropped.
More power to those who survived, even at the casino. It's true that if Janis had lived as long as Cher or if Hendrix were still strumming a Strat, this would have an element of sadness. They might have, or almost certainly would have, undergone a marked decline. But maybe their persistence could’ve expressed something hopeful about art and craft and dedication and the continued meaning of their own cultural moment. Maybe it would’ve brought comfort to the people in their own cohort. And maybe it could even have taught those young’uns something.
The Stones, rocking into their 80s, are doing all that and then some.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell