But are they really relevant anymore? Variations of the same question were muttered here and there this week, after The Rolling Stones announced they were releasing a new album. They probably also released a single. Not bad, just that, of three men in their eighties. But the answer to the question is probably self-evident: Of course The Rolling Stones are no longer relevant. That’s not the point. NEW SINGLE: Ronnie Wood, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards released the single “Angry” this week, and talked about the new album that will be released in October. Photo: AFP Once they were relevant, acutely relevant. It was the early sixties. It was then that the band brought rock inspired by American blues and raw sensuality into the charts and onto the concert stages. And they have continued to do the exact same thing, after it stopped being new, stopped being shocking, stopped being youthful, strictly stopped being cool. They have been pulling heavy riffs, fast cars and an overtly sexual image at regular intervals for over sixty years. They have survived time by not noticing it. It’s really ironic that “Angry”, the new single, was released almost on the day one year after the death of Queen Elizabeth II. In a way, they represented polar opposites in British society. The Queen was enthroned at the top of The Establishment, the Stones were the rebels who wanted to tear down the existing. ATTENTION: The cover of “Sticky Fingers” from 1971 was relatively typical of the sexually rebellious image of The Rolling Stones. In fact, the history of the Rolling Stones was influenced by the Queen, or at least by her echelon, long before the band existed. The band’s legendary guitarist, Keith Richards, was once a gifted boy soprano, the star of the choir at Dartford Tech school in Kent. In 1955 he had sung Handel for the young Queen Elizabeth in Westminster Abbey. The choir won awards, and Keith was allowed to skip classes in physics and chemistry to practice and perform. But when he ended up in the voice change, he was not only thrown out of the choir, he was also told to make up for the lessons he had lost. “I was so angry, I had a burning desire for revenge,” Richards writes in his autobiography, “The Life.” “That’s when I got a reason to want to burn down this country and everything it stood for.” He was always to be strongly critical of anyone who allowed himself to be dazzled by fine titles and old pedigrees, including Stones frontman Mick Jagger. ONCE UPON A TIME: The Rolling Stones in 1965. The original line-up was Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Photo: Ap But over time the Queen and The Rolling Stones came to represent something of the same. Because the queen too had done exactly the same thing for decades after decades, carried out her rituals over and over again. She sent her Christmas greetings, drove through the streets in a horse-drawn carriage, trooped up wherever she was wanted with a colorful hat, sensible pumps and a purse that was always a little too big. The Rolling Stones constantly traveled to the world’s concert arenas, opening concert after concert with the easily recognizable riff of “Start Me Up”. For the audience, both the queen and the band became a bridge to an earlier version of themselves. To a time when the world was the way it used to be. As it felt more clear. The need for anchoring is another heavy reason why both Elizabeth, Mick and Keith became unifying figures. REPRESENTED THE RITUALS: Both Queen Elizabeth, Mick and Keith became unifying and nostalgia-inducing figures in the end. Photo: AP When the queen died, online newspapers were flooded with photo cavalcades from seventy years on the throne. Here were countless pictures of the queen, with a tiara on her head, with heads of state who were long gone and dead. Something similar could be observed when the video for “Angry” was released this week. Some balked at the use of actress Sydney Sweeney as a pouty and meandering rock babe in an open car, a move that didn’t quite smack of 2023 (and again: that was probably the point). Still others, myself among them, were strangely moved by the video’s use of adapted, old film clips of the band themselves. In some of the cliffs they are fair-haired and wrinkle-free, in others their faces look like topographical maps. Here are the seventies jumpsuits with flair, the eighties neon colors. And through it all they play and play and play. On the one hand, the video is a shameless flirtation with the fans. On the other hand, a statement that few are lucky enough to make: The story of us is the story of an era. ANOTHER GENERATION: Sydney Sweeney, known from “Euphoria” and “The White Lotus”, stars in The Rolling Stones’ new music video. Her core audience is usually a bit different from the band’s. Photo: Reuters It has also been a fate to belong to The Rolling Stones, a fate that some of them have made small attempts to break with. The late drummer Charlie Watts was actually a jazz drummer, and always had a kind of distance about him, as if playing in one of the world’s biggest bands was just something he demeaned to do once in a while. Mick Jagger has made regular attempts to become a pop star, trying his hand at completely different music than the one that made him famous – also, of course, to the disdainful snorts of Richards. COMMON FATE: Keith Richards probably has the credit for the Stones always sounding like the Stones. But it is questionable whether he has not benefited from being held in the ears by the disciplined Mick Jagger. Photo: AFP It is Keith Richards who must have the credit for having kept the Stones sound alive for all those years. But it is also worth noting that he might not have succeeded if he, the swarmer, the eternal rebel, had not been kept in check by the ambitious and disciplined Jagger. Now it seems as if they have both come to terms with the fact that they are and will be tied to each other. At the same time, we others find out that we are and become bound to them. They are our time witnesses, and we are theirs.
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The Rolling Stones are naturally not relevant. That’s not the point either. – Speech
