A Year of Blind Spots: Their Satanic Majesties Request

I'm exploring a different classic album every week, in a random order, and every Saturday giving each of those albums a couple hundred words at most.

I don't know if this is one of those situations where the oft-discussed critical consensus affects how I personally view an album—kinda unavoidable sometimes with a band as popular as the Stones—but regardless, the consensus is true. Their Satanic Majesties Request doesn't quite hit its marks because on it, the Rolling Stones are trying to be something they are not.

 

Most people would describe that "something" that they aren't as "the Beatles," which isn't necessarily untrue (see anything familiar about the cover?). But I am seeing it in more general terms—both the Beatles and the Stones were clearly affected by the psychedelic bug in 1967, but it didn't fit as comfortably on the latter as it clearly did the former. It seems as if the more psychedelia you add, the more you sacrifice in terms of swagger. The Stones are all about swagger; that's their bread and butter. And you barely get any of it on Their Satanic Majesties Request.

It's not a complete disaster. "Citadel" retains some of the magic they found in the previous LP Between the Buttons. The verses in "2000 Man" hit kinda hard. But I dunno, the rest of it just comes off like the cool kids dicking around in the back of the classroom, making fart jokes that no one is laughing at. The extended nine-minute reprise of "Sing This All Together" in the middle of the album is excruciating, for example. You can tell the Stones think this is a whimsical journey, but it just comes off like nonsense. Even the one big hit from the LP, "She's a Rainbow," is only palatable because you've heard it 2000 times.

I can't even blame my old punching bag, the human sack of manure Charlie Watts. The dude sucks ass and does nothing to elevate any of the material on any song from this album, but, like, was there any worthy material to elevate in the first place? I dunno. Probably not.

I could see scraping off "Citadel" for my long-planned Rolling Stones Deep Cuts Playlist in the future, but as for the rest of Their Satanic Majesties Request, throw it in the bin marked "close but no cigar." Thankfully, the band allegedly had the same opinion of this album as I do, and because of that, they resolved to do better, resulting in the beginning of their imperial period (Beggars Banquet, and so on).