Ever wonder why people bash The Stones but years latter praise The Stones for what they did years after the fact. Example: I seen alot of people on the board mock The Stones during The No Security tour. Now people say how great it was and I wish they play like that again. Black and Blue is another. This is a crapy LP people would say. Now all I hear is how great it is. The Stones sold out during the B2B tour. now those same people want those years back. I love The Stones and will till the day I die. You will never live to see a band like this again.

its called envy

Youre toally correct. There will never be another Mick. He is certainly the best live performer in the catagory of rock music. I'm very happy I've seen them 15 or 16 times. Hey guys keep rockin'!

I think it all comes down to expectations, More Hot Rocks. Black And Blue maybe didn't fulfill the expectations of the time, given the quality of the Stones music in the earlier part of the seventies, but sounds genuinely inspired compared with their post Tattoo You output. I get frankly sick of those who object to the Stones being criticised and call it Stones bashing when it should be plain to anyone who cared to be honest with themselves that the Stones are simply not what they were. Maybe it's true it's perhaps unreasonable to expect them to be, certainly in the same way as their youth, but the Stones money making machine of more recent years may suck in some of the Stones fans, but never me - i don't believe fo a moment there's anything the least bit enduring about their present set up, whether live or in the studio, which is frankly a shame given their richly deserved historical status.

I get annoyed too by stupid and unfounded cristicism of The Rolling Stones. But being a fan of 32 years of the band I don't let it bother me anymore. The ultimate point is that they are a fascinating band, still to these days.
Rock and Roll,
Mops

Well said rollmops.

There are a number of people here who seem almost desperate to turn back the clock, as if they can will it to happen. They constantly criticize, which is their right, but it isn't gonna change anything, or prevent time from passing. It provides a bit of entertainment, but overall it IS ludicrous.

There is nothing wrong with criticism but it should be balanced with giving credit where credit is due- meaning you criticize them for some things and praise them for other things. Anyone that can't find anything good about the present incarnation of the band is just out of touch with reality imo- or just too stubborn to open their mind.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2008-05-24 23:29 by FrankM.

stones can still play live and thier last album was good, so credit to them for that.

It's called "Those were the good ol' days" syndrome.

It's about finding a new perspective, not necessarily turning back the clock.

Whenever you're on top there will always be people bashing and criticizing you.

I hate people who make fun of their age, but have never seen them perform. They'd be pretty impressed I'd think.

Quote
Edward Twining
I get frankly sick of those who object to the Stones being criticised and call it Stones bashing when it should be plain to anyone who cared to be honest with themselves that the Stones are simply not what they were.

Let me be dishonest for a minute then, and declare that I personally think that a lot of the music the Stones have made after "Tattoo You" is way better than a lot of their music from the 60's.

I LOVE the latterday Stones - I think Undercover is a great album, I really, really, really rate VL (one of their Top5 IMHO) and I think ABB is a late master piece. That is not to say I do not like the early Stones - I have every legal release and then some - but their sound these days just speak more to me.

Please, speak for yourself only

PS: I have been a fan since I first heard "Angie"/GHS in 1973



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2008-05-25 01:44 by mofur.

They still are "The greatest Rock'N'Roll band in the world" and always will be, even after they're gone!

I think the ones that love them the most, bash them the most...but that's part of the magic....

JR

I think the point about turning back the clock is dead on. Something about recapturing moments long past, recapturing youth. It is not only the Stones fans...go to a Springsteen board..you will hear the Magic stuff is good..but nothing like the 1978 tour. It is hard to understand..when I went to see the Cream reunion people asked me if it was the same as when I saw them in 1968..I said no..how could it be..it was 37 years later...it is impossible to stay the same. Was it enjoyable..absolutely... I have been seeing the Stones live for a lot of years..always enjoyed them..including the last tour.

should be shot and pissed on

The Stones will always be the "Coolest Rock n Roll Band", no doubt

It's Only Rock and Roll

Quote
rlngstns
should be shot and pissed on

What a waste of bullets and pee.

.... some folks are easily entertain'd,, a dam juggler can make a livin',, the

term 'rock n roll' seems like something out of an old life magizine.. . strange world.

Like how do these bashers get ta hear The Stones in the first place?
Loud sex-driven rock music is banned from most retirment-villages ain't it?



ROCKMAN

Quote
Rockman
Like how do these bashers get ta hear The Stones in the first place?
Loud sex-driven rock music is banned from most retirment-villages ain't it?

The stones wont be hearing much of it soon if thats the case.

C'mon when your a band of the Stones stature, criticism follows, some of it is justified, usually when its in the context of what the Stones have achieved. Their is an arc to most musical careers, if you have high points, it follows that all moments by definition wont reach those heights.

The Stones today are the same force today in either a musical or social context, as they were in their heyday, so what, why should we expect them to be, they stil do what its says on the box, the old records are still there and live they still produce what you would expect, one hell of a rockin show.

It is both profoundly ironic and deeply sad, that the Stones have managed to become the very antithesis of everything that they once stood for; and sadder still, to witness their cynical exploitation of that legacy.

Indeed, the sheer and utter greed of these skeletal fatcats is actually quite breathtaking; such is the extent to which their ruthless, relentless pursuit of obsecene levels of financial gain has taken them.

As a consequence, the shameless, systematic, milking-dry of all the things that made them what they once were, has repositioned them as absolute sitting targets, and as such, ripe and prime for a good old bashing.

Memorial Day Stones tee-shirt, anyone?

Well barn Owl I guess you one of them. I respect your opinion but who is is better them them. Absolutly no one.

IMO we have to deal with 2 types of Rolling Stones:

1. The Band and Their Music (fun and beauty); actually no reason to bash a Legend.

2. The Business-model ('the dirty work') and I don't bother to bash that "type 2 - Stones" because it can affect The Band and Their Music in a negative way....

I remember being furious when I read Alan Bloom's attack on Jagger in the 'Closing on the American Mind' in the 1980's ... and recently found it on-line. I still think it's a bunch of right-wing bullshit. Here it is, if you want to take the time to read it...

"It is interesting to note that the Left, which prides itself on its critical approach to “late capitalism” and is unrelenting and unsparing in its analysis of our other cultural phenomena, has in general given rock music a free ride. Abstracting from the capitalist element in which it flourishes, they regard it as a people’s art, coming from beneath the bourgeoisie’s layers of cultural repression. Its antinomianism and its longing for a world without constraint might seem to be the clarion of the proletarian revolution, and Marxists certainly do see that rock music dissolves the beliefs and morals necessary for liberal society and would approve of it for that alone. But the harmony between the young intellectual Left and rock is probably profounder than that. Herbert Marcuse appealed to university students in the sixties with a combination of Marx and Freud. In Eros and Civilization and One Dimensional Man he promised that the overcoming of capitalism and its false consciousness will result in a society where the greatest satisfactions are sexual, of a sort that the bourgeois moralist Freud called polymorphous and infantile. Rock music touches the same chord in the young. Free sexual expression, anarchism, mining of the irrational unconscious and giving it free rein are what they have in common. The high intellectual life . . . and the low rock world are partners in the same entertainment enterprise. They must both be interpreted as parts of the cultural fabric of late capitalism. Their success comes from the bourgeois’s need to feel that he is not bourgeois, to have un-dangerous experiments with the unlimited. He is willing to pay dearly for them. The Left is better interpreted by Nietzsche than by Marx. The critical theory of late capitalism is at once late capitalism’s subtlest and crudest expression. Antibourgeois ire is the opiate of the Last Man.

"This strong stimulant, which Nietzsche called Nihiline, was for a very long time, almost fifteen years, epitomized in a single figure, Mick Jagger. A shrewd, middle-class boy, he played the possessed lower-class demon and teen-aged satyr up until he was forty, with one eye on the mobs of children of both sexes whom he stimulated to a sensual frenzy and the other eye winking at the unerotic, commercially motivated adults who handled the money. In his act he was male and female, heterosexual and homosexual; unencumbered by modesty, he could enter everyone’s dreams, promising to do everything with everyone; and, above all, he legitimated drugs, which were the real thrill that parents and policemen conspired to deny his youthful audience. He was beyond the law, moral and political, and thumbed his nose at it. Along with all this, there were nasty little appeals to the suppressed inclinations toward sexism, racism, and violence, indulgence in which is not now publicly respectable. Nevertheless, he managed not to appear to contradict the rock ideal of a universal classless society founded on love, with the distinction between brotherly and bodily blurred. He was the hero and the model for countless young persons in universities, as well as elsewhere. I discovered that students who boasted of having no heroes secretly had a passion to be like Mick Jagger, to live his life, have his fame. They were ashamed to admit this in a university, although I am not certain that the reason has anything to do with a higher standard of taste. It is probably that they are not supposed to have heroes. Rock music itself and talking about it with infinite seriousness are perfectly respectable. It has proved to be the ultimate leveler of intellectual snobbism. But it is not respectable to think of it as providing weak and ordinary persons with a fashionable behavior, the imitation of which will make others esteem them and boost their own self-esteem. Unaware and unwillingly, however, Mick Jagger played the role in their lives that Napoleon played in the lives of ordinary young Frenchmen throughout the nineteenth century. Everyone else was so boring and unable to charm youthful passions. Jagger caught on.

"In the last couple of years, Jagger has begun to fade. Whether Michael Jackson, Prince, or Boy George can take his place is uncertain. They are even weirder than he is, and one wonders what new strata of taste they have discovered. Although each differs from the others, the essential character of musical entertainment is not changing. There is only a constant search for variations on the theme. And this gutter phenomenon is apparently the fulfillment of the promise made by so much psychology and literature that our weak and exhausted Western civilization would find refreshment in the true source, the unconscious, which appeared to the late romantic imagination to be identical to Africa, the dark and unexplored continent. Now all has been explored; light has been cast everywhere; the unconscious has been made conscious, the repressed expressed. And what have we found? Not creative devils, but show business glitz. Mick Jagger tarting it up on the stage is all we brought back from the voyage to the underworld.

"My concern here is not with the moral effects of this music— whether it leads to sex, violence, or drugs. The issue here is its effect on education, and I believe it ruins the imagination of young people and makes it very difficult for them to have a passionate relationship to the art and thought that are the substance of liberal education. The first sensuous experiences are decisive in determining the taste for the whole of life, and they are the link between the animal and spiritual in us. The period of nascent sensuality has always been used for sublimation, in the sense of making sublime, for attaching youthful inclinations and longings to music, pictures, and stories that provide the transition to the fulfillment of the human duties and the enjoyment of the human pleasures. Lessing, speaking of Greek sculpture, said “beautiful men made beautiful statues, and the city had beautiful statues in part to thank for beautiful citizens.” This formula encapsulates the fundamental principle of the esthetic education of man. Young men and women were attracted by the beauty of heroes whose very bodies expressed their nobility. The deeper understanding of the meaning of nobility comes later, but is prepared for by the sensuous experience and is actually contained in it. What the senses long for as well as what reason later sees as good are thereby not at tension with one another. Education is not sermonizing to children against their instincts and pleasures, but providing a natural continuity between what they feel and what they can and should be. But this is a lost art. Now we have come to exactly the opposite point. Rock music encourages passions and provides models that have no relation to any life the young people who go to universities can possibly lead, or to the kinds of admiration encouraged by liberal studies. Without the cooperation of the sentiments, anything other than technical education is a dead letter.

"Rock music provides premature ecstasy and, in this respect, is like the drugs with which it is allied. It artificially induces the exaltation naturally attached to the completion of the greatest endeavors—victory in a just war, consummated love, artistic creation, religious devotion, and discovery of the truth. Without effort, without talent, without virtue, without exercise of the faculties, anyone and everyone is accorded the equal right to the enjoyment of their fruits. In my experience, students who have had a serious fling with drugs—and gotten over it—find it difficult to have enthusiasms or great expectations. It is as though the color has been drained out of their lives and they see everything in black and white. The pleasure they experienced in the beginning was so intense that they no longer look for it at the end, or as the end. They may function perfectly well, but dryly, routinely. Their energy has been sapped, and they do not expect their life’s activity to produce anything but a living, whereas liberal education is supposed to encourage the belief that the good life is the pleasant life and that the best life is the most pleasant life. I suspect that the rock addiction, particularly in the absence of strong counterattractions, has an effect similar to that of drugs. The students will get over this music, or at least the exclusive passion for it. But they will do so in the same way Freud says that men accept the reality principle—as something harsh, grim, and essentially unattractive, a mere necessity. These students will assiduously study economics or the professions and the Michael Jackson costume will slip off to reveal a Brooks Brothers suit beneath. They will want to get ahead and live comfortably. But this life is as empty and false as the one they left behind. The choice is not between quick fixes and dull calculation. This is what liberal education is meant to show them. But as long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf."

Drew

People who bash the Stones are dour curmudgeons with tiny, shriveled, useless genetalia. They are bitter, spiteful people with empty lives and no friends.

Thanks Drew for providing that Bloom piece - now that is what I call bashing! But I think Jagger can only felt himself proud for having got such a huge recognition of his significance! Bloom makes him very central cultural figure. I mean, a book like "Everybody's Lucifer" made just Jagger's reputation bigger, and Bloom didn't do bad either - a good old Andrew Loog Oldham would have been proud for 'making' that!

Has anyone heard what might have been Bloom's reaction for Jagger's knighthood - not that Jagger screwed up American mind, but what a hell happened to Brits...

- Doxa

there is sufficient reason to be critical towards the today Rolling Stones:
- musically the band has changed from a hard guitar driven band into a band with two very mediocre guitar players heavily supporting on the background musicians.
It's simple laughable if some fans still say 'the Stones are the best band in the world' Muscially E-Streetband, Black Crowes, Clapton and many more have surpassed them. Nothing to do with taste.
- the boring setlists with hardly any new songs has been discussed more than often of this side. Each tour seems to be a new Steel Wheels tour.
- contrary to other bands like Springsteen, the Who, the Cult, L.Williams, Dylan, etc. no releases of interesting Vault material and/or downloadings offered from live gigs.
Instead boring DVD's with again all the boring war horses
- CD releases from Steel Wheels and on: a matter of taste. I think ABB is a very decent effort and without some 3/4 fillers would have been a very good album.
The other releases, SW/VL and BTB don't do much to me because I of the slick sound. I miss the 'dirty' sound from Exile, B&B, SG, etc.

Enough reasons to be very critical to a band I once loved.