Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Mick Jagger & The Neocons:

Mick Jagger & The Rolling Stones have a new tune out -- "Sweet Neocon" -- slamming Condi Rice.

They should stick to writing about what they know -- doing a lot of drugs, boffing supermodels, being super-rich and all that.

It could be though, that Mick Jagger has an especial loathing for the "neocons" after the intense criticisms that the intellectual godfather of many neocons, Allan Bloom, levied against Jagger.

I posted in more detail about this passage on Jagger, whom Bloom regarded as the epitome of everything wrong with rock culture, from The Closing of the American Mind.
This strong stimulant, which Nietzsche called Nihiline, was for a very long time, epitomized in a single figure, Mick Jagger. A shrewd, middle-class boy, he played the possessed lower class demon and teen-aged satyr up until he was forty, with one eye on the mobs of children of both sexes whom he stimulated to a sensual frenzy and the other eye winking at the unerotic, commercially motivated adults who handled the money. In his act he was male and female, heterosexual and homosexual; unencumbered by modesty, he could enter everyone's dreams, promising to do everything with everyone; and, above all, he legitimated drugs, which were the real thrill that parents and policemen conspired to deny his youthful audience.* He was beyond the law, moral and political, and thumbed his nose at it. Along with all this, there were nasty little appeals to the suppressed inclinations toward sexism, racism and violence, indulgence in which is not now publicly respectable. Nevertheless, he managed not to appear to contradict the rock ideal of a universal classless society founded on love, with the distinction between brotherly and bodily blurred. He was the hero and the model for countless young persons in universities, as well as elsewhere. I discovered that students who boasted of having no heroes secretly had a passion to be like Mick Jagger, to live his life, have his fame. They were ashamed to admit this in a university, although I am not certain that the reason has anything to do with a higher standard of taste. IT is probably that they are not supposed to have heroes. Rock music itself and talking about it with infinite seriousness are perfectly respectable. It has proved to be the ultimate leveler of intellectual snobbism. But it is not respectable to think of it as providing weak and ordinary persons with a fashionable behavior, the imitation of which will make others esteem them and boost their own self-esteem. Unaware and unwillingly, however, Mick Jagger played the role in their lives that Napoleon played in the lives of ordinary young Frenchmen throughout the nineteenth century. Everyone else was so boring and unable to charm youthful passions. Jagger caught on.


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