Rolling Stones 40 Licks Virgin brought to you by Egg Boy For years I dissed the Rolling Stones as the epitome of corporate whoredom. This view was climaxed by the strains of ‘Start Me Up’ used a few years back for a Microsoft campaign. The ugliness of their commercial waste was surpassed only by the aging faces of Mick and Keith, who managed through the 90’s to scrape themselves together to tour around ‘new’ albums of self-recycled riffs and bloated ballads. Being a musician, I felt an obligation to see them and scored some tickets to a 94 stadium show. Give them props for still kicking, but it still seemed stale. The old guard will tell you rock and roll has no age. Find someone under 30 that agrees. Enter 40 Licks, the latest repackaged greatest hits product from the Rolling Stones. Dribble to feed the pre-holiday public. And let’s include 5 new songs just in case you already have all the re-masters and reissues. Don’t want to give a fan any reason not to buy! This was how I felt about it until I saw a friend had purchased a copy. ‘Could I borrow this?’ I squeamishly asked, and hoped she’d say no, or at the very least, not tell anyone. Soon thereafter, something funny happened. I put in disc one on the subway. ‘Street Fighting Man,’ it’s mangled twang and raw production, begins. Is this the Hives, I ask myself? The Strokes? This can’t be those 50-something geriatrics I saw on a poster for an HBO special. This rocks! Right into ‘Gimme Shelter,’ with its ‘oooooo’s and percussive moodiness…it’s so…FRESH sounding. What’s happening here? Am I getting soft? It wasn’t that I was soft. It was just that I was born in the 70’s, when the Stones’ best work was more or less behind them, something easy to forget after their tenure in the 90’s. It’s easy to dismiss a lyric like ‘You can’t always get what you want’ when it’s been blared out of every classic rock radio station for the last 30 years, but that doesn’t make its essence any less pure. Disc one, for all intents and purposes, might be THE blueprint for every new rock band you read about last year, its sound, writing and attitude having been co-opted by so many. Hearing this is like drinking directly from a spring over having a glass of tap water; completely refreshing and newly interesting. Disc two, however, suffers from the burden of its time period, which is mostly the 80’s, ‘Start Me Up’ time to the five songs newly written and recorded. While some songs flourish in the tradition of their own legacy (the blues/disco romp of ‘Miss You’, Keith’s buoyant singing on ‘Happy’, the ZZ Topish ‘Shattered’), others are not so successful. Since ‘Harlem Shuffle’ is thankfully missing, the CD’s biggest bruise may be ‘Anybody Seen my Baby,’ a late 90’s turd replete with vinyl scratching (???) and some urban samples. (The band was sued, and lost, for this song’s melodic similarity to K.D. Lang’s ‘Constant Craving). The new songs are, well, ok. Helped out by Don Was’s retro production, a casual listener might not even notice their time period. Don’t feel bad by not owning this CD set, since the Rolling Stones have subconsciously helped you purchase a lot of other stuff through your years, but for its rock simplicity, its definitely worth borrowing and copying from a friend. Somewhere amid all the marketing, hype and bullshit, there lies a great, albeit over-exposed, rock band. Pros: Disc One Cons: Disc Two Metric Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? Goldfrapp Black Cherry Fleetwood Mac Say You Will DJ Dara Breakbeat Science Exercise 01 The 88 Kind of Light The Kills Black Rooster EP The Libertines Up the Bracket Jettatura Squadra Fantasma Tone Ambient Metals The Streets Original Pirate Material Grand Buffet Cigarette Beach Roni Size Touching Down Rolling Stones 40 Licks Brendan Benson Lapalco Anticon Music for the Advancement of Hip-Hop copyright © 2000-2005 - www.stellargirl.com