It’s only a Morgan troll, but I hate it: Piers Morgan vs. The Rolling Stones is the laziest culture war story of the year
Yes, *checks notes* Mick Jagger is a… *blinks* snowflake.
Look, I’d like to pretend that Piers Morgan doesn’t exist as much as you, his colleagues, his ‘friends’, and many of his family members do, but he does and his latest noxious emission for MailOnline represents the height of culture war desperation so I — we — are going to look straight at the horror.
In a long interview with the LA Times (‘You haven’t heard the last of Charlie’: Rolling Stones on a bittersweet tour and new music, October 7) the topic of the band’s setlist came up and specifically the place of Brown Sugar in it. Mikael Wood, the LA Times’ pop music critic, writes:
One song the band seems to have dropped from its set since the tour started up again is “Brown Sugar,” the Stones’ gleefully problematic early-’70s smash that opens on a “Gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields.”
“You picked up on that, huh?” Richards said when asked why they’re not playing the tune. “I don’t know. I’m trying to figure out with the sisters quite where the beef is. Didn’t they understand this was a song about the horrors of slavery? But they’re trying to bury it. At the moment I don’t want to get into conflicts with all of this s—.” He laughed in his signature raspy fashion. “But I’m hoping that we’ll be able to resurrect the babe in her glory somewhere along the track.”
Jagger, as usual, was more circumspect than his freewheeling counterpart. “We’ve played ‘Brown Sugar’ every night since 1970, so sometimes you think, We’ll take that one out for now and see how it goes,” he said. “We might put it back in.” For the frontman, “the setlist in a stadium show, it’s kind of a tough one” — all those thousands of people to please while you work to stay engaged yourself in the music. “We did ‘Let It Bleed’ last night, which I managed to play on 12-string guitar,” Jagger said proudly.
The debate over Brown Sugar’s lyrical content isn’t new. In an interview from 1995 with Rolling Stone — conducted by its founder Jann Wenner in a manner that also wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) fly now — Jagger talked about the song:
Wenner: This is one of your biggest hits, a great, classic, radio single, except the subject matter is slavery, interracial sex, eating pussy …
Jagger: [Laughs] And drugs. That’s a double-entendre, just thrown in.Wenner: Brown sugar being heroin?
Jagger: Brown sugar being heroin and –Wenner: And pussy?
Jagger: That makes it … the whole mess thrown in. God knows what I’m on about on that song. It’s such a mishmash. All the nasty subjects in one go.
Wenner: Were you surprised that it was such a success with all that stuff in it?
Jagger: I didn’t think about it at the time. I never would write that song now.Wenner: Why?
Jagger: I would probably censor myself. I’d think, “Oh God, I can’t. I’ve got to stop. I can’t just write raw like that.”
Keith Richards didn’t explain who was objecting to the track — it’s probably a waste of time to expect a coherent explanation of anything from Richards at this point — and Jagger is clear that the song could return to the setlist whenever the band feels like it.
This isn’t “cancel culture” or censorship, it’s a band editing its setlist to keep it fresh turned into a story by some rambling comments from Richards. But to that great jowly bloodhound Piers Morgan, forever sniffing the lamp posts in search of what he perceives to be the acrid stench of “wokery”, it’s proof the Stones have turned into snowflakes.
Beneath a typically prolix Mail headline — I'm getting no satisfaction from seeing the Rolling Stones surrender to the woke brigade - when the charts are full of rappers glorifying violent sex, misogyny and guns, why is Brown Sugar the song that's deemed offensive? — which could have been produced by a tedious AI trained on Piers’ past comments, Richard Littlejohn’s back catalogue, and the ramblings of the bar botherers in any flat-roof pub, Morgan writes:
When the Rolling Stones appeared on the Ed Sullivan show back in 1967, lead singer Mick Jagger changed the words to their smash hit ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’ to ‘Let’s Spend Some Time Together.’
This was because the original sex-hinting lyric was deemed too offensive for ultra-conservative American TV viewers to endure.
It was even reported that puritanical host Sullivan told the band, ‘Either the song goes, or you go’ before they agreed to change the line.
In the end, Jagger did censor himself – the Sullivan show sold more records than anything else on TV at the time - but rolled his eyes witheringly as he sang the new wording.
I’m fairly sure that Morgan has lifted that straight from the Wikipedia page for Let’s Spend The Night Together just as he’s lifted the argument that follows from every anti-hip hop reactionary since Republicans lost their toupees over 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As They Wanna Be and NWA’s Straight Outta Compton in 1989:
[The Ed Sullivan Show incident] seems incredible now, right?
In an era when rap lyrics are riddled with not just hardcore sexual content but also vile misogyny, sexism, homophobia, rape fantasies and violence including entreaties to kill the police, such concern over something so relatively tame seems laughable.
Morgan tells his readers:
… it’s now been revealed that the Stones have stopped performing one of their biggest ever hits, Brown Sugar, due to complaints that it, too, is unacceptably offensive.
This is a big deal.
Famously when something is “a big deal” you have to explicitly say so; it’s similar to how estate agents feel the need to point out a pokey bedsit is “compact” and “bijou”. Morgan’s entire brand is built on the concept that there is a legion of woke stormtroopers dominating culture and he will resew any story to make it fit the tapestry he’s making. So he continues:
Jagger made it all sound perfectly innocent, replying: 'We've played 'Brown Sugar' every night since 1970, so sometimes you think, we'll take that one out for now and see how it goes. We might put it back in.'
But it was clear from the response of Jagger’s bandmate Keith Richards, who co-wrote Brown Sugar, that this was no casual decision and had in reality been taken after complaints that the song’s lyrics were offensive because they reference slavery and are therefore racist.
Richards was mystified about the backlash.
'I'm trying to figure out with the sisters quite where the beef is,’ the 77-year-old guitar legend said. 'Didn't they understand this was a song about the horrors of slavery? But they're trying to bury it.’
Who are “they”? Richards didn’t say but — despite the Stones having total control over what songs they do or do not play — Morgan turns to the usual explanations: It’s… the woke! And Keith Richards has backed down to them:
Then, in words of surrender that made my skin crawl from a man who’s never submitted to anyone about anything, he added: ‘At the moment, I don't want to get into conflicts with all of this s***. But I'm hoping that we'll be able to resurrect the babe in her glory somewhere along the track.'
Really, Keith?
You no longer have the stomach to stand up for yourself and fight for what’s right?
You were the guy who also co-wrote Street Fighting Man for god’s sake!
Morgan ignores the implication of the words “at the moment” — Richards’ bandmate of 58 years standing, Charlie Watts, died only weeks ago — and seems to operate under the illusion that Keith, who nearly killed himself falling out of a tree, is a literal scrapper because he co-wrote Street Fighting Man. Perhaps he also believes that Ringo Starr has a yellow submarine berthed somewhere along the Mersey.
Having raged at Richards, Morgan moves onto his ‘defence’ of the Stones:
Given this cowardly climbdown, let me make the case for the defense [sic] on the Stones’ behalf: there is nothing racist about Brown Sugar.
It’s a song, as Richards says, that highlights the appalling historical reality of slavery, not one that celebrates it.
It depicts female slaves being sold, whipped and raped in America’s south.
Most people know and understand this, not the least the two men who actually wrote it in the first place and who have famously championed black music artists more than any band in history.
In fact, according to Bill Wyman, the song was inspired by a black backing singer named Claudia Linnear [sic] who was Jagger’s girlfriend at the time he wrote the song and who did a photoshoot for ‘Playboy’ magazine in 1974 titled ‘Brown Sugar’.1Though another of Jagger’s exes, a black woman named Martha Hunt, later claimed it was about her.
Whatever the truth, Brown Sugar is demonstrably a song aimed at defending and supporting black women, not one that seeks to denigrate them or make light of slavery.
The notion that Brown Sugar — originally titled Black Pussy — is a stinging critique of slavery is at best a stretch and at worse downright insulting. The chorus with its druggy double entendre (“Brown Sugar, how come you taste so good?/Brown Sugar, just like a young girl should”) is not as Morgan maintains about “defending and supporting black women” but fetishising them.
Morgan’s magpie article — cobbled together from second-hand opinions, bits of Wikipedia and sections swiped from interviews he’s half-read — follow his usual technique of making sweeping assertions, factually dubious claims, and cheap insinuations while holding himself up as a moral arbiter. A good indication that he knows very little about the topic is that Claudia Lennear — the soul singer Morgan demeans in his copy — is referred to as “Claudia Linnear”. 2
He continues:
When ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’ was banned several years ago, in the maelstrom of the #MeToo movement, for supposedly promoting sexual assault – which it doesn’t – and ‘Saint’ John Legend pathetically rewrote the lyrics to suck up to the world’s equally irritating virtue-signalers, the public reacted how I hoped they would and sent the song roaring back to the top of the charts.
Just as when Gillette abandoned their pro-men branding to suddenly make all men feel ashamed about being male, their sales collapsed.
Baby It’s Cold Outside — which was controversial from day one (NBC initially objected to the song as “too racy” before relenting back in 1949) — has not been banned. The cringe-worthy rewrite performed by John Legend and Kelly Clarkson on a 2019 episode of The Voice hasn’t supplanted the original and the ‘debate’ over the lyrics is now a hardy seasonal perennial alongside Fairytale Of New York-gate and the wider “war of Christmas” bollocks.
Similarly, Morgan’s claim that “Gillette [abandoning] their pro-men branding” led to a collapse in sales is not supported by the facts. Following January 2019’s “The Best Men Can Be” campaign — which Piers Morgan filled his nappy about at the time — Gilette’s sales did not rise or fall significantly3 despite conservative threats of a boycott and one analysis of social media posts found that the response to the ad had been largely positive.
Of course, Piers Morgan, whose new deal with Rupert Murdoch includes a follow up to his ‘cancel culture’ book Wake Up, claims this is all part of a wider ‘woke’ scheme. It’s also unsurprising that the same Piers Morgan who has obsessed over Meghan Markle and Naomi Osaka manages to make a white band dropping a song about black people about… other black people. He writes:
After the death of a teenager at the hands of a Korean store employee in 1991, Ice Cube released a song called Black Korea that contained this lyric: ‘So don’t follow me up and down your market/ Or your little chop-suey ass will be a target/ Of the nationwide boycott/ Juice with the people, that’s what the boy got/So pay respect to the Black fist/ Or we`ll burn your store right down to a crisp/ And then we`ll see ya/ Cause you can’t turn the ghetto into Black Korea.’
The lyrics remain uncensored or edited.
Rappers also spew incredibly offensive lyrics about women.
Snoop Dogg sang: ‘B*itches ain’t sh*t but hoes and tricks, lick on these nuts and suck the d*ck.’
Kanye West sang: ‘I know she like chocolate men, she got more n*ggas off than Cochran.’
While he also throws in a couple of token white people for criticism — quoting Eminem and Robin Thicke — it’s striking that Morgan acts as if Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg and Kanye West have not faced any criticism for those lyrics. Let’s take Ice Cube, for example:
The Village Voice review of Death Certificate — the album that includes Black Korea and No Vaseline — called the rapper “a straight-up racist, simple and plain, and, of course, a sex bigot, too” while Billboard published an editorial that condemned him for pushing “the rankest sort of racism and hate-mongering”.
Off the page, the Simon Wiesenthal Center called for record chains to stop selling the album and the National Korean American Grocers Association lobbied the owners of St. Ides malt liquor to drop Ice Cube as a spokesperson.
Of course, Morgan’s position is hypocritical. He wonders why (mostly) black artists haven’t been cancelled — implying that they should have been — while whining about the Rolling Stones choosing to drop Brown Sugar from their setlists voluntarily and perhaps not permanently. This attitude is pervasive among columnists on the right; they are not defending freedom of speech but the freedom of right speech.
For another example today look at perpetually-thirsty drink driving enthusiast Paul Staines and his motley crew of Muttleys revelling in the cancellation of a Black History Month talk by Professor Priyamvada Gopal to Home Office employees. Staines and others like the laughable Free Speech Union are only concerned with ensuring that people who share their views are able to speak.
Morgan’s Stones comments are covered in other newspapers as an event in itself — The Guardian includes such an extensive quote from him in its story about the LA Times interview that its advertising department should send the Mail an invoice immediately — and he knew that would happen. His deal with Murdoch was done partly on the basis that Piers Morgan not only comments on the news — in a relentlessly bad faith fashion — but will gin up his own if there’s no handy controversy to cling onto.
The conclusion to Morgan’s Mail column is so rote that it may as well have been composed with cut-up fragments from his past rants; an unappealing salad of confected outrage and cancel culture cliches:
It’s very disappointing to see Mick Jagger of all people bow to the PC mob like this. He made no secret of his derision back in 1967 when he was ordered to censor ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’ by Ed Sullivan.
Yet now, he’s capitulating in a far worse way.
The whole point of the Stones was that they defiantly pushed boundaries and challenged conventional thinking, not behaved like timid little scaredy-cats every time someone sobbed ‘Boo hoo, I’m so offended.’
Grow a pair, Mick (no apologies to any wokies offended by this phrase), stand up to the woke bullies, and sing Brown Sugar loudly and proudly at the rest of your shows.
Or Gimme Shelter from the Satisfaction you’ve given the woke brigade who are out there today chanting ‘Under My Thumb’ about you.
This may be the new rock’n’roll, but I don’t like it.
The whole point of the Rolling Stones is to make money and despite deaths, lineup changes, and cultural shifts, it rolls on. So too does Brown Sugar, which — at the time of writing — remains available on a variety of streaming platforms and a plethora of physical formats.
But Piers Morgan is singing an even older and eminently more awful song — the whiteman’’s whine — and it never drops out of the charts. You can expect to see cover versions in every other newspaper before the week is out4. Yes, it’s only a Morgan troll, but I hate it, hate it, yes, I do…
Brown Sugar was released in 1971 so Claudia Lennear’s 1974 Playboy shoot under the title is a reference to the song not the inspiration for it. It’s also very unlikely that Lennear had any say in how the piece was headlined.
It’s MARSHA Hunt not Martha btw
P&G, Gilette’s parent company, did write down the value of the brand by $8 billion in June 2019 but the reasons for that were far bigger — currency devaluation, increased industry competition, and a shrinking market for blades and razors — than a limit conservative tantrum over one ad campaign.
Of course, The Daily Telegraph is already at it.