Fuck me, all those sixties guitar wankers going on and on and on about how the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Who etc. is the best thing since sliced bread, dissertating with religious solemnity about some insipid riff from track eight on the twenty-seventh album that “the Stones” recorded in a twelve-day period in 1967, informing us of the “background” to some disposable lyric about a hair-brained groupie that Mick Jagger wrote after deploying about three of his seventeen remaining braincells from amidst an impenetrable fog of cigarette smoke, rambling on their YouTube channels about how “rock peaked” in the 60s, all while stroking their beards and gesturing to their wall-mounted vinyls…
It’s all so, so, so monstrously overrated and hackneyed. I perfectly understand if these 60s fetishists were themselves 18 years old at the time these records were released – everything’s better when you’re a teenager, after all, and these decrepit old fucks have every right to sacralize their youths in the few years remaining to them before they do everyone a favour, die, and forever shut the fuck up about how the live recording of some obscure Cream gig at the Royal Albert Hall sounds better than anything on Wheels of Fire, which is not much of an accomplishment, if you want my opinion.
But what I cannot understand, or tolerate, or endure, is the phenomenon of people that have spent less than half a century on planet earth, and who in some cases are under the age of 30, gushing over Revolver or Beggar’s Banquet like it’s rock at its finest, its purest, its hippest. It isn’t. 60s rock was a necessary start, but it’s an embryonic and not particularly sophisticated variant of the artform, and for my money, it hasn’t aged well.
To wit: Aftermath, the Rolling Stones’ fourth studio album, is frequently held up as some kind of foundational rock’n’roll gem, a Founding Fathers-style document that contemporary rock fans are bidden to explicitly pay homage to, or at least acknowledge, in any assessment of subsequent iterations of the genre, alongside other obligatorily sacral Dead Sea Scrolls-like texts such as Sgt. Peppers and Highway 61 Revisited. But is it actually that good? It’s OK. But it’s definitely not as good as The Queen is Dead, or Born in the USA, or The Bends. In fact it’s not even in the same stratosphere as those records.
First, the music. Yes, the menacing and misanthropic “Paint it Black” is among the best records in rock history. The keyboard-inflected, Doors-prefiguring “Stupid Girl” is entertainingly skittish and deranged. But much of Aftermath comprises twangy, worryingly naff country-and-western cosplay (“High and Dry”), forgettable mid-60s pop-rock filler (“Think”), and most bizarrely of all, a kind of mock-Medieval acoustic ballad seemingly written from the perspective of one of the Knights of the Round Table (“Lady Jane”).
I will concede that there’s some substance to the lyrics, that Aftermath rarely falls into the trap of later rock records, whereby the lyrics comprise suggestive but ultimately meaningless agglomerations of nice-sounding words (à la Michael Stipe). There’s an intellectual acuity here, with moments of Bacchanalian nihilism (“Flight 505”), or just unadulterated nihilism (“Paint it Black”, “I Am Waiting”) proving particularly titillating. Disconcertingly, however, the words are more frequently articulative of that quintessential 60s dichotomy whereby women appear either as all-powerful Madonnas (“Lady Jane”) or worthless and vindictive whores (“Under My Thumb”) – a baleful phenomenon that the Beatles, those Buddhistic heralds of peace and love, were also implicated in (see the harrowing “Run for your Life” at the end of Rubber Soul).
Ultimately, though, Moonie-like disciples of records like Aftermath aren’t really in it for the lyrics or even the music – they’re in it for the allure, the singular 60s vibe, Swinging London, Beatlemania, sex-and-drugs-and-rock’n’roll, basically everything their boring suburban parents waffled to them about while they were still wide-eyed and incapable of forming their own opinions. If they had been, they wouldn’t have wasted another second on “classic rock’s first wave” when they could’ve just put Baby One More Time on.
Overall rating: * * *
Standout track: “Paint it Black”