Helmut Staubmann - The Rolling Stones: Sociological Perspectives

Introduction

The Rolling Stones in Sociological Perspectives

Helmut Staubmann

The Rolling Stones worldwide success over the course of more than half a century is without doubt one of the most remarkable phenomena of popular culture. A plethora of publications and discussions has been grappling with every aspect of their music and lives, ranging from the most indisputably significant to the most trifling or banal facets. Yet it was mainly the related journalism in specialized music and pop magazines, such as Melody Maker, New Musical Express, and Rolling Stone andin the more recent pasta broader public of writers and readers on the World Wide Web and internet social media that sustained this discourse. Cultural and social scientists were, and are, conspicuously absent in their comment, despite the obvious affinity between the Rolling Stones phenomenon and the examination of socio-cultural issues.

In their early days their marketing strategist Andrew Loog Oldham recognized the phenomenons relevance for, and as an expression of, the socio-cultural milieu, which he focused with an ingenious formulation in one of his advertising slogans, which stated that the Rolling Stones wereor should befive reflections of todays children.

Given what we know about adolescent affections, it is a striking and starkly atypical peculiarity that the children referred to by Oldham maintained their love for the Rolling Stones throughout every stage of their livesespecially in light of the fact that they were joined by their children and, in more recent times, even by their grandchildren. The Stones are more than a particular generational phenomenon, and are of definite sociological interest and import. The Rolling Stones arein the terminology of Emile Durkheima genuine fait social, and Oldhams slogan must be transposed into the more general question of how they reflect the conditions and state of contemporary society, and how their success relates to the transformation of contemporary culture.

When Goetheregarded as the all-time towering prodigy of German literaturewas confronted with the question as to why he had become so famous, he did not refer to his genius, as was expected, but came up with a somewhat modest answer. It was, he said, because he and Germany grew up together. With respect to the Rolling Stones the answer to the corresponding question might well be (at least in their beginnings with Andrew Loog Oldham): It all happened because they and post-war youth, with all their social and cultural peculiarities and transformations, grew up together.

But lets start with what the Stones themselves have to say. The opening question by Larry King in his interview of Mick Jagger at the occasion of the appearance of the documentary film Stones in Exile was just like the one posed to Goethe: How do you account for the longevity of the Stones success? Jaggers answer was as humble as Goethes: Well... (short pause) I think the Stones are very lucky. You always need a lot of luck and I think they were in the right place at the right time and we, when we work, we work very hard. So you need all those things.... You got to be hard working on your game and be lucky.

What Goethes and Jaggers answers have in common is that they are sort of counter-intuitive to our common understanding. We are used to attributing success to the object in question or, in economic terms, to the commodity itself (Jagger could have said: Well, just listen to our music) or to the ones who create it (We are the best rock and roll band of the world). Instead he goes beyond the everyday interpretation that attributes accomplishments simply to the artist or the quality of their creations. Such a post-heroic view, as it has been called, is implicit in Jaggers self-explanation and refers ultimately to three ingredients of success. Firstly, the game itself; secondly, the coincidence of the right circumstances which are extremely complex and beyond the control of any players and, if they just happen to be there, count as luck; and, thirdly, hard work and the effort of maintaining the game.

There is basically not much more that could be said. The success of the Stones rests on these three pillars: their music, their performances, and the ecology of conditions and circumstances. These are the axioms, as it were. They are as simple and possibly appear as trivial as the axioms of mathematics. But despite the fact that the whole of mathematics can be accommodated in its axioms, they certainly dont dispense for the need for further scholarly work. What the chapters in this volume attempt is a sociological delineation of what Jagger referred to as luck and hard work, an analysis of the social and cultural ecology that induced the great resonance to music, concert performances, films, books, and all sorts of other public appearances of the Rolling Stones.

Sociological Explanations of Music and Musical Experience: The Sorcerers (Rolling) Stone?

Any attempt to understand the music of the Rolling Stones in Durkheimian terms as a fait social is an intricate task with pitfalls which one needs to be aware of. It was precisely sociology and cultural studies that incorporated a series of errors within their doctrines which are commonly taken for granted. Therefore, a disclaimer of the aspirations of the following chapters needs to be made beforehand.

It undoubtedly was progress to take culture, technology, the economy, and other forces of society into account and not simply make recourse to individual ingenuity. Goethe expressed something which in the nineteenth century emerged as a quasi-spirit of the time and would over time establish itself within the social and cultural sciences; namely, to understand human history as a complex occurrence that cannot simply be reduced to individuals and their actions. Ever since then the history of social sciences is quasi the history of the deconstruction of individualism and of cultural objectivity. Through the work of Karl Marx or Thorstein Veblen to Pierre Bourdieu runs a common thread. It would be neither a matter of individual creativity nor of cultural meanings of the objects created, but rather of socioeconomic and political forces that lay behind and have to be de-masked as a product of these forces.