The Rolling Stones & Brown Sugar — way past time to let it go
Mick Jagger’s heart surgery behind him, this summer brought the Rolling Stones to North America once again — but as thrilling as the Stones might be, the shows didn’t bring much in the way of surprise. There was Mick’s strut, Keith’s defiance of death, and the songs, all of them deeply familiar: “Wild Horses,” “Gimme Shelter,” and, over and over, “Brown Sugar.” Which is, you may or may not recall, a funky, swampy, rocking celebration of the rape of enslaved Black women.
Jagger has said in the past that he doesn’t really know what “Brown Sugar” is about: “God knows what I’m on about on that song,” he said to Rolling Stone in 1995. “It’s such a mishmash. All the nasty subjects in one go.” But I know what it’s about, because I’ve listened to the lyrics.
Here’s the first verse and chorus:
Gold Coast slave ship bound for cotton fields
Sold in the market down in New Orleans
Scarred old slaver knows he’s doin’ all right
Hear him whip the women just around midnightBrown Sugar, how come you taste so good
Brown Sugar, just like a young girl should
Jagger isn’t the first songwriter to say he doesn’t know what a particular song is “about,” and the rest of the track is certainly given to some interpretation. You can argue about what the woman of the house was doing, or the house boy; how old was the Cajun Queen anyway, when she was dating all those boys?
Sometimes, though, words just mean what they mean, whether you want to admit it or not. There’s a slave ship, a market, and a slaver, who’s whipping the women and posing a question: “How come you taste so good?” The only thing left unclear in the first third of the song is whether the whip is literal, or a phallic symbol. Possibly both?
I’m a life-long rock nerd. I know how women are too often treated in the songs and the industry. I know how specific men have treated specific women — Brian Jones, for instance, the Rolling Stones’ founder, was a violent man who visited his demons on women across the globe. There are artists to whom I no longer listen because their ugly side is just too ugly; there are probably more to whom I give a pass, because the music-loving heart is capricious.
More than one fan has said they’re willing to give “Brown Sugar” a pass, too. In 2015, Lauretta Charlton, the New York Times Race/Related Editor, wrote for Vulture that “when I hear ‘Brown Sugar,’ the outrage hits me like a postscript, and by that point I’m too busy clapping and singing along to be indignant” — and the relationship that Black women have with art that turns its lens on them is something that is clearly outside my scope of argument or lived reality.
What I would argue, though, is that for rock’s predominantly white audience, the calculus has to be different. “Brown Sugar” isn’t just any song, and the Rolling Stones aren’t just any band. Jagger, Richards, Wood, Watts, Taylor, Wyman, and Jones (Brian and Darryl) are among an extraordinarily small handful of artists who can rightfully claim to be foundational to everything that came after them. No one working in pop culture, certainly no musician, works outside the shadow cast by the Rolling Stones — a band that shamelessly cribbed, borrowed, and stole its path to the pantheon from African-American musicians, the very people who invented rock n’ roll in the first place.
Daphne Brooks, Professor of African-American Studies at Yale and author of an upcoming three-volume study of black women and popular music culture, has taught “Brown Sugar” frequently over the years. She notes that the roots of rock go even deeper than the mid-century shotgun shacks and Chicago nightclubs that the Stones managed to both glamorize and obscure: “You don’t have rock n’ roll,” she says, “without the Atlantic slave trade.”
As a Gen Xer coming of age in the Bay Area, Brooks says, “I found great sonic pleasure in the Rolling Stones…. Especially Hot Rocks [a compilation including “Brown Sugar”] was really important to my teen years.”
It wasn’t until she went to college, though, that Brooks understood the “egregiously problematic” nature of “Brown Sugar’s” lyrics; in 2004 she wrote that “each time ‘Brown Sugar’ rides the sonic currents of a stadium sound system during a professional sporting event, the song’s historical complexities are further obscured.”
So to clarify, if not every complexity, at least the performative moment that will be replicated several times this summer: Here’s a group of elderly white men — men who were once the embodiment of raw sexuality — singing to a predominantly white audience, earning millions for a predominantly white, male industry, about a slaver who rapes Black girls. Not as a scene of horror, but as porn.
We don’t need, at every point in our pop culture consumption, to grapple with every problematic notion that arises. But in this age of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, as we finally begin a national discussion around reparations for slavery and try to look honestly at what happened to the Central Park Five — maybe we can let this one song go.
In an ideal world, perhaps, the Stones would commit to never playing “Brown Sugar” again, and ask for guidance from African American women as to where the royalties might be donated. Or write new words. We can dream.
In the absence of those kind of amends, though, both the music industry and rock fans — or at least those of us who have ultimately been the greatest beneficiaries of a nation built on slavery — can make a choice: to leave “Brown Sugar” on the ash heap of history. Teach it as an example of the industry’s worst impulses against women, and a chapter in the complicated journey that rock took from America to England and back again. Acknowledge that monstrous riff — and listen instead to Rhiannon Giddens’ “At The Purchaser’s Option.”
I’ve got a body, dark and strong
I was young but not for long
You took me to bed a little girl
Left me in a woman’s worldYou can take my body
You can take my bones
You can take my blood
But not my soul
Emily L. Hauser is a Chicago-based freelance writer and librarian. She would also like you to stop listening to “Summer Nights,” “Blurred Lines,” and Ray LaMontagne’s “Repo Man,” but we can talk about that later.
Writing is my job. My work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, & a long list of other print & online outlets, including The Chicago Tribune, Paste, DAME, & StarTrek.com. I’d you’d like to support my work, or just spot me a cup of coffee, you can do so via PayPal or Ko-Fi. And please share what you’ve read with your friends!
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