Re: If "Black and Blue" was a new release this year...
Date: October 23, 2007 01:41
Edward Twining Wrote:
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> Black And Blue is in a different class to A Bigger
> Bang.
>
> The Stones hadn't quite lost their muse at that
> point in time although i think it's fair to say
> they were no longer as focused as they had been at
> the turn of the 70s. The greatness was still very
> apparent if not quite so finely tuned.
>
> With A Bigger Bang the emphasis is more on
> crafting a palatable album which is easily
> digestable to the masses by incorporating a few
> typical Stones sounds which weakly echo the Stones
> at their best. However,the genuine Stones magic by
> this time was long gone.
>
> Black And Blue isn't prime Stones but it contains
> enough flashes of the old magic to show the
> Stones still at that point in time had a relevant
> place in the music scene.
Exactly my thoughts!
BLACK&BLUE was much better effort than IT'S ONLY ROCK AND ROLL (that was their first effort to play as 'they used to do', and it can been heard as quite uninspired material), but somehow the band did not totally found its new focus or direction yet. They are in the middle of process that never quite accomplished. With SOME GIRLS they were found new muses (punk, disco) and there they nail the thing 100%. But there is something peculiar in BLACK % BLUE that can not be found in any other Stones album. I think one can call it 'maturation'. If they would have included "Worried About You" or "Slave" as well (as is recommended here), this theme would be even clearer. It's quite 'odd' Jagger there, don't you think? The guy who sings about his daughter who tell to his daddy to not to cry, tells long stories about 'memory motels' and strange shooting accidents in 'one-horse-town'; quite strange, and even idiosyncratic stuff sometimes. You don't find story-ballads like "Memory Motel" or "Fool To Cry" in any other Stones album. Something was going with Jagger at the time, and his usual irony and laugh was not so much present but something else (a brief melancholy even?) The mood of "Hand of Fate" is also unique piece of work by the Stones; I don't find that anywhere else. Even the rocker "Crazy Mama" has a sort of dark, not so light-hearted, usual 'let's just fvck' feeling in it; there is some distance with the band and the style of the song it is; they - especially Mick's voice - played with a 'I've seen it all, but I am not too impressed, but more like bored now' attitude, new way the same old thing (for example, the attitude in SOME GiRLS towards the rockers is very different). The jazzy "Melody" is a new kind of 'sophisticated night-club Las Vegas-friendly' reading of their blues past, where Muddy and Robert Johnson are left behind. Maybe Jagger felt this was going too far, and decided to leave "Slave" and "Worried About You" out, to not show too much sensitivity or vulnerabilty or sounding like old fart or whatever.
But then there are those crazy experimets with recent black music. I personally love "Hot stuff" as one of their strongests statements ever. It is really 'fvck you all who thought we should sound something you suggest'. That's living and breathing, bad-ass Rolling Stones I love. "Cherry Oh Baby" is a reggae experiment and one of their biggest failures ever, and think it really is one of the main reasons why the whole album never reached any masterpiece status. Because there is only 8 songs, each of them weights quite a lot. For example, compared to "Hot Stuff", "Hey Negrita" sounds quite lame, and the standard of the album obviously suffers from that.
I think if BLACK&BLUE would be released now, and some of its 'maturation' themes would take bravely further, perhaps added with Keith's recent 'matured' ballad stuff, we might have The Stones' own TIME OUT OF MIND in our hands, a new chapter in the recorded history of The Rolling Stones. Instead of that we got new versions of the same IT'S ONLY ROCK'N' ROLL album again and again (well, to be true: not very often...).
- Doxa
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 2007-10-23 01:54 by Doxa.