What follows are two quotes from a famous writer—someone whose rise to fame preceded rock—talking to an interviewer about the Stones (both quotes are from the same interview). Rather than tell you who this is and where it’s from, I’d rather let you, dear reader (??) take a guess. Perhaps it’s extremely obvious? (If you are familiar with the passages and want to spill the beans, that’s fine; there’s no special prize here for answering correctly.)

There’s something unsatisfying about Jagger. We must have listened to two hours of music. Jagger’s always promising so much more than he delivers. You know, finally he’s in a sinister bag—he is certainly of all, if we take the three, four, five, six major rock groups in the last ten years, he has been the one who was the most sinister. Yet he’s finally not terrifying…

Jagger himself, or his music?
His music. I don’t know anything about him. I think that the Beatles, you know, can hit eight bars in Sgt. Pepper that are more frightening, even though they’re not sinister. The Beatles had more of a sense of powers they could summon by playing the wrong note at a given moment. It’s as if they’re more terrified by music than Jagger. Jagger’s terribly spoiled. There’s all that muttering in the background: “Oh, no God, you won’t break this heart of stone.” What a threat. Beyond that constant dirge, beyond the throatiness which makes you think he’s riding on the rims, through all that electric masturbation, you know, all that sound of distant musketry, every drumbeat, there’s still a mountain of bullshit. It’s not getting in and saying, I’m going to kill you, motherfucker. It’s not saying, I’m here to call upon Satan. It pretends to. Some of his music I find, you know, marvelously promising. But it’s irritating as hell to listen to for two hours because you keep waiting for the great payoff, and it never comes.

But again there’s a kind of bullying that I’ve always distrusted in rock. Which is, it doesn’t take big balls to have a big electric guitar and a huge amplifying system and 50,000 American corporations that they’re all sneering at, working overtime to amplify them. You know, it’s a little bit like some politician that you despise saying, I represent the people. He only represents his power in his microphone and his media, his vested electronic office.

“Sympathy for the Devil,” I felt, was arch, and much too self-conscious. I couldn’t quite catch the words and that’s one of the things about Jagger that’s always suspect to me. When you play on the edge of the articulation of words it’s because you’re trying to do two things at once. I did hear him at one point wailing about the Rus­sian Revolution—that the Devil was there at the planning of the Russian Revolution and, you know, that’s news. No good Chris­tian ever thought of that before. That, I thought, was finally on the edge of the revolting. You don’t, you know, you don’t infuse a bunch of dumb, spaced-out, highly sexed working kids with a little historical culture while you’re singing. Come on! I decided Jagger must have picked up a magazine article about the Russian Revolution the day before he wrote the words. But, you know, there’s more profundity in “Eleanor Rigby” than there is in “Sympathy for the Devil.”

“I think there is a difference nowadays, yeah. Back when we were first starting, there were plenty of women who were clearly very confident in their sexuality and also quite controversial: Patti Smith, Siouxsie Sioux, Wendy O. Williams, if you ever saw her. That’s one reason a lot of them became iconic in the way that they did.

“The difference now is that there’s not the feeling that some female artists today are in control in quite the same way. Wendy used to put gaffer tape over her nipples and blow up cars and all that, but there was always a sense that she was very conscious of what she was doing as a woman. She wasn’t just being lusted after.

“Everyone thinks that Miley’s outrageous, but they should watch Wendy and the Plasmatics at Pier 62 in New York in 1980.”

– Dave Stewart, interviewed in PopMatters

“I haven’t written a god damn record review in well over a year. The last several reviews I managed to crank out before I quit should never have been written. There just came a point for me where the whole thing began to seem entirely useless. The record Biz, the groovy people that run it, the groups, the rock press, one album after another of highly sensitive, down-with-it, back-to-the-country, introspective, controlled, self-indulgent music — tell traces of a generation in rapid retreat.”
– Langdon Winner, review of Doug Sahm in Creem, December 1971

The thing about rock music, in all of the forms that I’ve worshipped, is that it’s not about thinking. You have your cerebral performers, but rock music is about the body: the corporeal sensations of fucking, moving, imbibing, ejecting. It is not about the caverns of the mind. And those caverns are where Bach spent his lifetime chasing the intricacies of forms, twisting the ideas of what music can do, wedding it to mathematical possibilities, but never forgetting that, as Keats wheezed, Beauty is Truth. Beauty is the best thing we can point at in order to say “God.”

Kaya Oakes, via (the usually somewhat more reliable) Andrew Sullivan.

My thought-free response.