The Rolling Stones' guide to world politics
From the Iraq war to the financial crisis, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have a song that seems to fit the occasion

John Harris
guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 January 2011 20.30 GMT

As was reported yesterday, among the tonnes of leaked papers about the Israel-Palestine conflict, there lurks a particularly remarkable memo from September 1999. It offers advice about Palestinian negotiating tactics, and suggests adopting an approach recommended by the Rolling Stones in 1969. From the top, then: "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you might find you can get what you need."
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards will doubtless be thrilled with their new role as geopolitical gurus – but their songs have, on the odd occasion, dealt with such topics as a matter of deliberate intent. In the wake of the Gulf war, they released a single titled Highwire, pointing out how the US had once aided Saddam Hussein; on 2005's A Bigger Bang, there was a piece about the Bush administration called Sweet Neo Con (it rhymed "certain" with "Haliburton").
True to the spirit of the aforementioned memo, here are four Stones songs with completely unintended messages about war, peace and world affairs . . .

Tony Blair, the Iraq war, and the views of the attorney general
The Last Time, 1965

Thanks to the Chilcot inquiry, we now know Lord Goldsmith advised that invading Iraq without a second resolution would be illegal, but that Blair thought his views merely "provisional". Shades, perhaps, of this early Stones toe-tapper: "I told you once and I told you twice/ But you never listened to my advice . . ."

Extraordinary rendition
Dirty Work, 1985

The Stones predict contracted-out torture: "Let somebody do the dirty work/ I never see no grease on you baby/ Never roll your sleeves up, do you, never baby/Let somebody do the dirty work/ Do it all, do it all for free/ While you're out having all the fun/They'll take the blame when the trouble comes."

The Non-Aligned Movement
Sittin' on a Fence, 1967

While conflicts rage and the big powers square up to each other, the 118 member countries of the NAM want no part of it. So, think of such noble nations as Belarus, India, Haiti and the Maldives, while humming this Jagger/Richards throwaway: "I'm just sittin' on a fence/ You can say I got no sense/ Trying to make up my mind/ Really is too hard to find/ So I'm sittin' on a fence."

Why finance capital is ultimately king
You Got the Silver, 1969

Why do the banks get away with murder? Why does no one ever make a move on offshore tax havens? Over to Richards: "You got my heart, you got my soul/ You got the silver you got the gold/ You got the diamonds from the mine/ Well that's all right, it'll buy some time." This is what all western governments believed until autumn 2008. Doh!

[www.guardian.co.uk]

slow news day...

IMO,proudmary ,you shouldn't post this kind of link imo.

The newspaper's reputation is a platform for left-wing opinions
Hope bv will delete your thread
I still don' get who are the posters who ,according to BV, reported my "11 Septembre "thread .


Cheers, AL



I am a Frenchie ,as Mick affectionately called them in the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1977 .

Quote
SwayStones

I still don' get who are the posters who ,according to BV, reported my "11 Septembre "thread .


Cheers, AL

I'd really like to know who repeatedly reported swiss and me on my thread about Merck cocaine. I, at least, called that person an idiot and therefore was banned. But swiss didn't call names, didn't write anything remotely offensive, she just expressed her point of view - and very interesting one. That's this thread without swiss' and my posts
[www.iorr.org]
It is a pity that because of the anonymous informer one of the best posters has left

Quote
proudmary

Quote
SwayStones

I still don' get who are the posters who ,according to BV, reported my "11 Septembre "thread .


Cheers, AL

I'd really like to know who repeatedly reported swiss and me on my thread about Merck cocaine. I, at least, called that person an idiot and therefore was banned. But swiss didn't call names, didn't write anything remotely offensive, she just expressed her point of view - and very interesting one. That's this thread without swiss' and my posts
[www.iorr.org]
It is a pity that because of the anonymous informer one of the best posters has left

You mean you can't call someone an idiot? Where is the fun in that?

This is why I don't mention politics, only as it pertains to the Stones music or Bianca....and even then, its murky waters....
I confess I have not read the fine print in board propriety, but at another Stones board, there was healthy discussion of politics. Namecalling, attacks etc......and then you would eventually run into that person on another thread and agree on something else, and makeup....
That was part of the fun.
As for this article, they mentioned the least political Stones songs.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2011-01-25 23:00 by stupidguy2.

a little more politics

Rock's fake rebels
The Rolling Stones were always more reactionary than revolutionary, as Keith Richards proves

Dorian Lynskey
guardian.co.uk

Like many national landmarks, Keith Richards is regarded fondly because he never really changes. You see him and you think: ah yes, that's what rock'n'roll stars do. Even as he increasingly resembles a character from Jim Henson's Creature Shop, the 66-year-old guitarist can be relied on to maintain such long-cherished habits as smoking, drinking and being amusingly rude about Mick Jagger. Decades removed from when he was considered a threat to the morals of the nation's youth, his hellraising exploits seem cosy. These days it is not his lifestyle that has the capacity to raise eyebrows but his politics.
On Friday he told an interviewer that he had sent Tony Blair a letter of encouragement to "stick to his guns" over Iraq, back when most musicians were either opposing the war or maintaining a discreet silence. On Saturday, in an extract from his new memoir Life, he wrote about his love for Anita Pallenberg, and her physical abuse by his bandmate Brian Jones. "If I were Brian," he reflected, "I would have been a little bit sweeter and kept the bitch." The real villain of the piece is Jones, who died in 1969, but the language still startles.
Richards' attitudes towards women seem to have been preserved in aspic around the time England last won the World Cup. You could get away with a lot in a pop song back then. If anyone today released songs like the Hollies' Stop Stop Stop, a chirpy ditty about molesting a belly dancer, or Gary Puckett's creepy No 1 smash Young Girl, the Top 10 would start to look like the sex offenders register. Yet even by the standards of the time, the Rolling Stones were foul to women, from the putdowns and power games of Under My Thumb and Stupid Girl (which Richards attributed to being surrounded by "too many dumb chicks" to the lurid fantasies of Midnight Rambler and Brown Sugar.
Unlike, say, the Beatles' Run for Your Life, the misogyny was not an unfortunate, swiftly regretted blip. The Stones' unpleasantness was integral to their uncanny power. In an era when many young people saw rock stars as potential heroes of the revolution, the Rolling Stones appealed to less altruistic desires: sex and money. If the Beatles were rock's questing superego, then the Stones were the slavering id.
In the fervid atmosphere of the late 60s, not everybody recognized to what extent this was true. Because the Stones' songs sometimes sounded like revolution (largely thanks to the dark drama of Richards' guitar playing), many critics leapt to false conclusions. When Jagger briefly dabbled in politics during 1968, attending an anti-war demonstration in Grosvenor Square and telling the Sunday Mirror that "there should be no such thing as private property", some activists got carried away with the idea that the Stones were insurrectionists: Tariq Ali's radical magazine Black Dwarf even printed the lyrics to Street Fighting Man next to a few lines from Engels. How wrong they were.
In 1970, the critic George Melly concluded that rock'n'roll was "a fake revolt with no programme much beyond the legalization of pot." I doubt Richards quibbled with that verdict. "Politics is what we were trying to get away from," he said at the time. True enough, Jagger dropped his radical rhetoric, and moved on to the big obsession of rock's next decade: making as much money as humanly possible. John Pasche's 1970 illustration of the singer's tongue and lips became the perfect example of band-as-brand. In their bald misogyny, the Stones might have seemed like throwbacks, but in their commercial empire-building they were pioneers.
So we shouldn't be surprised by Richards' reactionary words. While Jagger has often told people what they want to hear, Richards tells the truth of the Rolling Stones. He represents the side of rock music that is amoral, hedonistic, self-serving and red in tooth and claw, offering in place of noble aspirations a guiltier, more primal thrill: the licence not to give a damn.