The Rolling Stones are Over-rated, but Not Worthless

There are many people out there who think The Rolling Stones are good. Worse than this, there are many people out there who think The Rolling Stones are better than The Beatles, a proposition that used to infuriate me in my youth but which I now simply find laughable. So laughable, in fact, that I'm not even going to try to substantiate my opinion, which I consider empirically obvious to any objective listener. I suspect that anyone who prefers The Rolling Stones to The Beatles is reacting to each band's myth rather than their music.

I could continue on about how even the myths are misleading and that people who gravitate toward the Stones, or rather away from the perceived mainstream poppyness of The Beatles are being fooled by the Stones cultivated grittiness, by their very publicly diving into the seamy side of the Rock 'n' Roll lifestyle - a move which did much to obscure their mostly upper- and middle-class background - when it was actually The Beatles who were a product of the gritty working-class world that the Stones would so successfully co-opt. When the Beatles became the undisputed rulers of the pop-music world, they had no reason to exploit their rough background. It would seem that they were just as happy to let it go...and leave it as yet another crumb for the always second-best Stones.

But enough of that; I didn't start this post to slam The Rolling Stones. On the contrary, I wanted to praise them for writing some of the most kick-ass music of all time. Am I contradicting myself by saying this after spending my first two paragraphs lambasting them? No. I never said The Rolling Stones were talentless, only that they were over-rated and don't deserve the place that they appear to occupy in music history as peers of The Beatles. The Beatles had contemporaries...but no peers, and if any artist came close, it was Bob Dylan, not The Rolling Stones, but again, I digress. Having been fed the Beatles/Stones dichotomy by the pop historians of the last 40 years, it was a logical place for me to start, but I only use it to say this:

While The Beatles were a musical phenomenon of amazing consistency who put out more than one LP averaging 14 songs each year from 1962 to 1970, each LP containing great songs from start to finish (with minor exceptions in the "Beatles for Sale" and "Magical Mystery Tour" cases) and whose worst output remains catchy and listenable, for all of their accomplishments, The Beatles never wrote anything that kicks as much ass as "Monkey Man", which may be one of the toughest, ball-crushingest songs in the universe. Much as I like to say The Beatles have no peers, I'd like to say "Monkey Man" has no peers. However, it does. Fortunately for the Rolling Stones, they also wrote "Can't Ya Hear Me Knockin'" which, along with The Faces "Stay With Me", may have one of the most viscerally infectious intros in musical history; so, not content to have written the singularly kick-ass "Monkey Man", the Stones went ahead and wrote the would-have-been-singularly-kick-ass-if-we-hadn't-written-Monkey-Man "Can't Ya Hear Me Knockin'". That's two songs that I would be hard-pressed to leave out of my top ten songs of all time list, and both of which might find themselves in the top five. The Beatles probably don't get more than one in there.

And that's what I have to say for the Stones. I don't really like The Rolling Stones. I don't have many of their albums, and those that I do have were bought of a sense of obligation to explore this music so hyped by so many people and, after two or three listenings, have been subsequently left to gather dust. "Exile on Main Street"? Sure, it's ok. It's got "Loving Cup", so it can't be all bad, but if I put it on, it's only for the Quartet:
5. Tumbling Dice
6. Sweet Virginia
7. Torn And Frayed
8. Sweet Black Angel
9. Loving Cup

And really "Sweet Virginia" is only tolerated because it happens to come between "Tumbling Dice" and "Torn And Frayed". "Sticky Fingers"? It's got "Can't Ya Hear Me Knockin'", but frankly, I'd be better off with some compilation, because other than occasionally feeling like a little "Sister Morphine", that album can go in the trash.

Yes, there is much sludge in the Stones's song catalog. Still, when they get it right, the get it right with a mother-fucking vengeance, and ultimately, it's worth going through the sludge to get to those gems.