The Rolling Stones retired one of their most popular rock songs due to lyrics that depict the horrors of slavery.
The Stones have not played the 1971 hit “Brown Sugar” on their current tour and said the blues classic has been removed from their setlist.
“You picked up on that, huh?,” Keith Richards, 77, responded to the LA Times when asked if the Stones had cut the second-most-performed tune in their catalog amid a climate of heightened cultural sensitivity.
“I don’t know. I’m trying to figure out with the sisters quite where the beef is. Didn’t they understand this was a song about the horrors of slavery? But they’re trying to bury it.”
The first verse of the hit song depicts slaves being sold and beaten in Louisiana, with references to a “slaver” who whips “women just around midnight.”
The famous chorus portrays a non-consensual sex encounter between the violent master and a young female slave, while possibly also alluding to heroin use.
In the next verse, the song describes the abuse suffered by slaves on a plantation. Lead singer Mick Jagger ends the tune by singing, “How come you taste so good … just like a black girl should.”
“We’ve played ‘Brown Sugar’ every night since 1970,” Richards told the newspaper.
This is just another example of entertainers bowing to censorship. The song has been played for fifty years without incident and now suddenly its offensive . Mick Jagger even says it depicts the horrors of slavery.
The stones say they want to avoid controversy.
Well here are some songs from the set list of the 2021 tour
Street Fighting Man
“Street Fighting Man” was released in the United States within a week of the violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and radio stations refused to play it because they were afraid it would incite further violence
Let’s Spend the night together
in order to perform it on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Stones famously had to change the titular line to “let’s spend some time together,” but Jagger added in exaggerated eye rolls with every “some time” and slipped a few “the nights” in there anyway during the performance, causing an infuriated Sullivan to ban the band from the show. (That “ban” lasted a whole two years.)
Honky Tonk women
The song is still apparently too scandalous to be performed in China. In 2014, Jagger announced onstage that the Chinese government had prevented the Stones from playing the song,
Satisfaction
when it was released in 1965. Certain cities banned it on the radio even though its vocals were intentionally buried low in the mix in an attempt to sneak its lyrics past censors and get it airplay, and the group was not allowed to sing the line about “trying to make some girl” on a 1965 performance on ABC’s Shindig!
Gimmie shelter
The lyrics include “Rape, Murder, its just a kiss away.
When will people stand up and say enough?? From the stones dropping Brown Sugar, Jay Leno apologizing for Asian jokes he did decades ago. The out cry against Dave Chappelle for his latest special.
Also, where is the out cry against the rap music community where their lyrics praise a gangster mentality and lyrics are violent and misogynistic. The out cry is not there because if you say one word you are racist, or if a black activist says something they are labeled an Uncle Tom.
We are at the point in this country where a small group want to remove free speech, and the Woke movement in my opinion are the enemy within and should be dealt with as enemy combatants.
When will this end? In my act I say it will end when it goes from entertainers being censored to average people saying something at work in the break room. When it starts to affect regular people that are just trying to go to work and pay their bills it will happen.
We will be discussing this live on Davin’s Den October 19th six thirty et. Go to davincomedy.com and click the Davin’s den link or go to the Davn’s Den face book page to see us live.