“I song approximately rise you was invented this always, specially attempts the tube which measures them, because not being joke whose Satan is bigger it second time) some type world-wide disappearance is bad (cheerfulness, him which is the low of the futures them accurately, that is knowing, you does not laugh absolutely. Song of the rock and, Nostrodamus and the rock, accurately with all prophets, maintains their preparation which has the value of recreation. He to leave this him of you, in case, anything predicts annoying possibility is not with realness not to be and but enough the concreteness which is sufficient knows wearing out is meditation from point. The word which processes from fickleness like being recently with a lyric urban their beetle of file of most and today a riddle and, is preparation and the astrologer who are to trade of the prophet.”

Any other candidates for best “lyrical reference to a pop song within another pop song?”

In any case, this is a wonderful edition of Popular, one I’d missed the first time around.

I agree with Marcello re: Jagger’s reliability in such matters.

If the song is indeed an anti-war protest, one could not determine that based on a reading of the lyrics alone.

And even Mick Jagger said once in an interview that it was a statement against the Vietnam War!!!

I once heard a fundamentalist preacher denounce this song as satanic, and I sort of shrugged it off as nonsense, but, in a way, he was right. If you think of satanism as the ultimate nihilism, then this song appears to be as satanic as you can get, especially if you don’t listen to the lyrics carefully enough to realize what the circumstances are, which is what I imagine this preacher did. He felt the song, but he didn’t really listen.

I’m not sure if it is one but “raga ” music , by one definition is “the most important concept that any student of Indian music should understand. The Hindi/Urdu word “rag” is derived from the Sanskrit “raga” which means “colour, or passion” . It is linked to the Sanskrit word “ranj” which means “to colour” . Therefore rag may be thought of as an acoustic method of colouring the mind of the listener with an emotion.

In this case, black

Brian in Canada

No more pop either. Or a different, more malevolent manifestation of the worst things that unresolved grief can do to a person.

The carnal brutalism versus the reined-in meditation - maybe even black versus white - 21st century cold rationalism against 19th century warm temperance…

…and therein lies the difference between “Eleanor Rigby” and “Paint It, Black.” McCartney addresses the passing of an unmourned, unnoticed life as though George Sand were being briefly hijacked by Beckett - but more of that when we come to it - but Jagger rages, the music, like a thousand-strong phalanx of Dave Clark Fives (the pitiless but resolute thumping by Charlie Watts which inevitably mutates into a martial death march at fadeout), rages alongside him (not behind him), sticking the second-hand dagger into the belly of cosy Beat Boom architecture.

To many people of 1966, this wasn’t quite where the Stones stopped being “pop” and started being “rock,” but the schism certainly dates from their singles output of that year. Compare the motivated but polite innovations of “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” with the suitably epileptic “19th Nervous Breakdown” (”Paint It, Black”’s predecessor, which significantly stopped at #2) or the etiolated chaos of its successor, “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing In The Shadows.” For the latter was the Stones’ Strawberry Fields/Boys Keep Swinging/Kid A let’s-test-the-audience litmus test, both with its very masculine transvestite video, the record’s grotesque mauling of music hall memes (the brass is like Jack Hylton’s front line sinking in the Lusitania) and the way it explodes and teeters into anarchistic silence. That got no further than #5 - a significant commercial failure by the Stones’ standards - and it could be argued that this was the point when the cloakroom girls deserted them. Indeed, from about ‘68 onwards they have scarcely bothered with singles as anything other than album trailers.

But then there’s that other key line in “Paint It, Black” (why the mysterious comma? A Decca typing error, says Keef) - “Like a newborn baby, it just happens every day.” The business of death, that is, for the people who “turn their heads” - but the anxiety in Jagger’s delivery suggests that he dies anew every day anyway (”No more will my green sea turn a deeper blue”).

It’s a thunderous and still disturbing record - its absence from Club Popular on Friday night was noticeable in the way that something like “Johnny Remember Me” wouldn’t have been - and only Jagger’s It Ain’t Half Hot Mum-isms towards the fade deter me from giving this my second 10.

Lena’s “Paint It, Black” is my “Paint It, Black.”

In the ’70s I had a fantasy of making a movie about an American high-school drama club in 1968 putting on Hamlet. First shot is offstage, actors and crew milling about, rehearsal not yet started, a record player in the foreground, the single drops, “I see a red door and I want it painted black.”

Mid movie we’d play “Street Fighting Man.”

I got not further with the concept than that: Hamlet, “Paint It, Black,” “Street Fighting Man,” high school, 1968. Teenagers, whip-thin, courageous, and frightened, ready to move but don’t know what they want, but konw something’s rotten.

But “Paint It, Black,” by contrast, seems truly tormented, and it’s not just the lyrics or Jagger’s vocal. The eerie, exotic, and fragile melody of the sitar opening (one of those incredible touches that only Brian Jones could contribute) abruptly shifts into Charlie Watts’s ferocious pounding–a rapid mood swing of the sort one might experience in a distraught moment–sets the pace for what is to come. Layer upon layer of dread on top of gloom–the droning, sinister, “hmn-hmn-hmn-hmn-hmn” backing vocals, the fuzzy instrumentals–present grief as a wall of sound toppling over on the bereaved as it drives into chaos engulfing Jagger’s final cries. All in all, this is what melodrama (in the truest sense) was meant to be, a great piece of drama on vinyl.

It was the sonic emotionality that impressed me when I first heard it; it took several hearings for me to sort out the lyrics altogether. (Already preordained for my future profession, though, I not only understood but was also mightly impressed by the arch and archaic “I could not foresee this thing happening to you.” A rather gothic touch that heightens the black tone, that. It still puts me in mind of Poe’s “Annabel Lee.”

Nonetheless, I remember feeling a shock when I first understood the subject matter–I couldn’t (and still can’t) recall such a treatment of death in rock/pop music.

Is it sincere? Has Jagger EVER been sincere? Was Poe sincere, for that matter? In the end, I don’t think the sincerity of the piece is what matters. What makes it extraordinary is the overwhelming sonic impression of an emotion whose inevitability we would all wish to be spared.

Doctor Mod

In terms of the marks, as ever they are entirely my personal gradings - I’d guess that anything I give 7 or more to will be a ‘10′ for someone reading (and quite a lot of the things I give less!)

And you made a good point here, although you don’t call much attention to it:

“A lot of the time the test of that conviction is whether I can inhabit the song, how much I can enjoy its emotion vicariously, swaggering out a rhythm or swooning into mock heartache.”
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“When it happens to someone you know, you find yourself saying things like, it’s impossible to imagine how they must feel. And I think it is. You may find yourself awed and moved by their public strength, or by their eloquence, but for many of us the most we can offer is friendship, not empathy.”
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The test of “Paint It, Black”’s conviction, at least for me (as someone who likewise has never had this happen to me) is that I can’t really understand it. I’m awed and moved, but something about the sheer scope of the despair inherant in that situation prevents me from empathizing, no matter how much I’d like to.