"When the Whip Comes Down"
The Rolling Stones
from Some Girls
1978
My parents—I mean, ahem, Santa Claus—gifted Rolling Stones tickets to me and Pam for Christmas. This is all the excuse I need to start doing a little more digging into the Rolling Stones' discography. Not that I honestly think they are going to be playing deep cuts from Goats Head Soup at Lincoln Financial Field, but I want to be prepared because they could, right?
I tried talking to my pops about where I should listen next, since I already know the classic four (Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street). He was the wrong person to go to. First, he claimed that his favorite Rolling Stones was Hot Rocks, which is a fucking Greatest Hits album. Second, when asked about Some Girls, he claimed that he never got into it because it was a "disco album." After actually listening to Some Girls, I can definitively say that it is not fully disco by any means. Save for their ostensible hits ("Beast of Burden" and "Miss You"), it's more punk than disco. See "When the Whip Comes Down" for an example.
This is not disco. It's a relentless rocker with a pretty big bite, possibly due to the fact that three guitars battle for attention (Jagger learned how to play guitar so he could get in on the fun). And I give shit to Charlie Watts for mostly being a subpar classic rock drummer, but there's no denying that he shows Bonham-like power here.
As far as the lyrics go, I hesitate to call the song "progressive," but it is kind of crazy that Mick Jagger felt comfortable enough in the '70s to write a song from the perspective of a gay prostitute. I'm not gonna defend his use of the word "f*g" by saying "it was a different time" or whatever, that excuse is dumb. But I do think that Jagger was coming from an empathetic place. In an interview, he said of the song: "I don't know why I wrote it. Maybe I came out of the closet." It's probable that he's making a joke, but there's evidence that Mick Jagger is bisexual, so maybe consciously or subconsciously he wrote this song with himself in mind.
Whether you take it as a quasi-LGBTQ anthem or just a rollicking punk song, it's still worthy of your time.
This is not disco. It's a relentless rocker with a pretty big bite, possibly due to the fact that three guitars battle for attention (Jagger learned how to play guitar so he could get in on the fun). And I give shit to Charlie Watts for mostly being a subpar classic rock drummer, but there's no denying that he shows Bonham-like power here.
As far as the lyrics go, I hesitate to call the song "progressive," but it is kind of crazy that Mick Jagger felt comfortable enough in the '70s to write a song from the perspective of a gay prostitute. I'm not gonna defend his use of the word "f*g" by saying "it was a different time" or whatever, that excuse is dumb. But I do think that Jagger was coming from an empathetic place. In an interview, he said of the song: "I don't know why I wrote it. Maybe I came out of the closet." It's probable that he's making a joke, but there's evidence that Mick Jagger is bisexual, so maybe consciously or subconsciously he wrote this song with himself in mind.
Whether you take it as a quasi-LGBTQ anthem or just a rollicking punk song, it's still worthy of your time.
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