70. The Rolling Stones - Aftermath (April 1966)

1. Mother's Little Helper*

2. Stupid Girl

3. Lady Jane*

4. Under My Thumb

5. Doncha Bother Me

6. Goin' Home

7. Flight 505

8. High and Dry

9. Out of Time*

10. It's Not Easy

11. I Am Waiting

12. Take It or Leave It

13. Think

14. What to Do

B+

So here we are again with the Rolling Stones. There debut was a collection of mostly forgettable R&B covers, but they'd obviously made great strides in the intervening years. Aftermath is their first album of all original material, written mostly by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger but with a number of important contributions by the rest of the band. And really, it's a pretty good album. If not for a few unfortunate lyrical choices I might even call it a great one. The production, for one thing, is damned near perfect. Aftermath was recorded in California, and escapes the scratchy thinness that typified a lot of UK recordings in the 1960s. The instruments are well-spaced and theirs a ghostly ambience that really fills out the sound.

Musically, too, this is a brilliant album. From a musical point of view there's really only one bad song on the album - the interminable "Goin' Home", which is eleven minutes of minimal blues noodling over which Jagger makes a bunch of sex noises. At the time it was probably great make-out music, but since I consider Mick Jagger's voice an immediate boner killer all I can say is that it was obviously important in the development of music I actually like, even if I don't much care for it in and of itself.

The only real problem with this album is one that many people have noted, and that quite a few have jumped through hoops to justify - several of these songs are pretty misogynistic. Now I'm not one of those people to bemoan anything that slights the fairer sex. I consider myself an egalitarian, in that I think men and women are equally shit. But I also have a utopian tendency to believe we might move beyond that shittiness into a wonderful post-gender world where everyone is nice to each other. And songs like "Under My Thumb" don't help. 

Honestly, the problem isn't even that it's misogynistic. If a woman sang this song about a man it would be equally reprehensible. It's a revenge song, basically, in which the narrator celebrates having taken someone who was a jerk to them and transformed them into his creature. I won't say it isn't a true-to-life portrait of a thing that frequently happens. But a better songwriter might have introduced some irony, or written about the subject from a different perspective which examines the dynamic from all sides. Instead the Rolling Stones celebrate it by marrying jubilant lyrics to one of the catchiest pieces of music they ever wrote. There's really only one context I can think of in which this song is worth listening to, and that's if you're a sixty year old man and your drunk and thinking about your ex-wife who got everything in the divorce.

For all that, I have absolutely no problem with "Stupid Girl". Some girls are stupid. Some girls are arseholes. Anyone who was ever part of any remotely happening scene can probably think of loads of women who fit the bill for this song. But it does become a problem when Jagger is pretty much only singing about women. He clearly had some issues with them, and taken as a whole there's not much balance on this album.

"Out of Time", a brilliant evocation of American soul music, is a truly great song. It's catchy and buoyant and honestly great, with a wonderful singalong chorus. But at the same time it's pretty bleak, lyrically, being about a girl who left a man to be part of the Scene and came back to find he'd outgrown her. Except this is the Rolling Stones so that narrative is expressed in the most arseholish way possible.

I also quite like "Mother's Little Helper". On the surface it's a song about housewives relying on pills to get through the day, but at the same time it manages to be a commentary on the hypocrisy and straightjacket conformity of the older generation at the time. On the one hand, the Stones seem to be commenting on a way of life so soul crushing that you need to drug yourself to get through a single day of it. On the other hand there's the fact that the mothers popping these pills would be scandalised if they found out that their children were using drugs.

The last song worth mentioning is "Lady Jane". Given the Stones' reputation as hard rockers, this is a distinct anomaly - a sort of Elizabethan love song about courtly love, of all things, in which Jagger explains to a bunch of women that as much as he loves them he is sworn to Lady Jane, and will always go back to her. It's probably about cannabis.

Anyway other than that there's no much to say. Side one is all over the place3 and very patchy, but side two settles into a great blues-rock-soul groove and is a lot of fun. The good thing about the Rolling Stones at this point is that they seem to want to be experimental while also remaining catchy and listenable, and so you get a lot of boundary pushing music that is still a lot of fun. I just think maybe a few of those boundaries shouldn't have been pushed.

So anyway, this is a great album mostly, but I just fucking hate "Goin' Home" and "Doncha Bother Me".