I never thought I'd get off on a new Stones album this much again.
After almost two decades on top, they seemed too convoluted to come out with such direct, hard-driving music, but it's folly to underestimate their survivorship, so I'm not surprised that they did. The sure thing was that they couldn't make me care about it--that no adjustment in the music or persona could jolt what they said or how they said it past my sensorium and into my soul. And I was wrong. Dirty Work (Rolling Stones) is a bracing and even challenging record. It innovates without kowtowing to multiplatinum fashion or half-assed pretension. It's honest and makes you like it. It's only Rolling Stones, yet it breaks down their stifling insularity, as individuals and as an entity. Since the last time the Stones released a surprising record-- Some Girls , eight years ago now, a third of their famous career out the window--the Stones have turned into exceptionally disgusting rock professionals. That doesn't mean it's been possible to dismiss them or their music--what's made them so disgusting is that you couldn't. Who gives a fuck if that smarmy has-been Mike Love seeds the PMRC or Ritchie Blackmore feeds his runs into an emulator? Who gives a fuck if Ozzy Osbourne gets fat on raw chicken or David Crosby gets fat on raw coke or Pete Townshend invents the rock novel? All these guys are pathetic clowns no matter how much money they make, pathetic clowns even if you have to respect them in a way, as I do Townshend and Osbourne. There's nothing pathetic about the Stones. That's what's made them worth hating in the '80s.
I mean, People and Rolling Stone don't go to Ron for comic relief or Keith for cautionary parables or Mick for thoughtful regrets--they go to them because they're almost as classy as Ahmet Ertegun. And though the music has been mostly dreck if not literal outtakes, there've been top-10 singles with every new studio release, deft and heretical and even nasty videos, and just to be contrary, one Good Stones Album. Some Girls it wasn't, but Tattoo You was better if not braver than Black and Blue and more attentively crafted than anything they'd recorded since their tenure as a vital force ended unexpectedly with Exile on Main Street in 1972. You were free not to like it much anyway, but you had to do backflips to explain why, eventually landing on one old saw or another, "commitment" or "inspiration" or something equally crucial and unempirical. You knew damn well that whatever you called it had gone thataway. And yet there were Ron and Keith and especially Mick (leave Bill and Charlie out of this), pulling that world's-greatest routine like there was no tomorrow.
Five years later, with only Undercover to show for it, the same saws are sure to bombard Dirty Work , in many ways a disgusting development indeed. First, it's the group's debut for CBS, which bought their myth even bigger than it did Paul McCartney's, squandering corporate resources that younger bands deserved. Then recall their special-achievement Grammy, accepted with hardly a smirk by a bunch of cynics who'd been blackballed back when they really were the world's greatest, followed by the rubber-lipped stereotyping of Ralph Bakshi's "Harlem Shuffle" video. There's the public disaffection of the band's fearless leader, who wouldn't start work on the album because he was promoting his last solo effort and won't tour behind it because he's starting work on the next one. Finally, there's coproducer Steve Lillywhite, who whilst proclaiming back-to-basics turned Dirty Work into the cleanest-sounding Stones album ever.
In the end its the production that will make or break this album critically, where it's sure to put off purists, skeptics, and snipers, and commercially, where it's almost sure to pull in trendies, children, and curiosity-seekers. Not that it isn't plenty basic, don't get me wrong. Based on riffs worked up by Ron and Keith before Jagger sullied his consciousness with them, the arrangements are the simplest on any Stones album since Some Girls if not Aftermath . There are no horns, the backup singers know their place, and Jagger doesn't bother with the melismatic affectations that have turned so much of his '80s product in on itself. What's more, Lillywhite claims that all the songs, including many keeper vocals, were recorded live in the studio. But I wouldn't expect the pear-shaped guitar breaks that finish off both lead cuts of Mick Taylor, much less Ron or Keith (Jimmy Page gets a credit). The up-front drums--some supplied, I hear, by computerized Charlie, with the inevitable loss of subliminal unpredictability--are pure Lillywhite. And so is the overall sound of the thing. As a matter of technical principle, Lillywhite goes for a mix that's as spacious as the arena-rock simulations of the '70s yet doesn't murk up details, and he gets it every time. Anybody who thought "Miss You" was a sellout is going to puke all over this one.
Me, I'm a Marshall Crenshaw fan who thinks Field Day is the man's strongest album, and I like the way Lillywhite and the Stones collide. Just as his drum mix underscored Field Day 's depth, his clinical spaciousness recasts Jagger's fascination with distance, which of late has made Mick sound more lost than anything else (and without even knowing it, poor old guy). But where Lillywhite unbalanced Crenshaw's commercial appeal, the Stones have the mythic clout to take him on. This record is going to fuck the heads of the young chime addicts who think U2 and Big Country are guitar bands. It's clean and even modish, but until the side-closers it's utterly unpretty, and its momentum is pitiless. Jagger bullies up into a steady bellow that has all the power of Plant or Hagar and none of the histrionics. Catch me in a perverse mood and I'll even defend the video--better they should offend by meaning to than by breathing.
Anyway, "Harlem Shuffle" is hardly the first good ...
https://www.beatles.ru/books/paper.asp?id=2479
