The Rolling Stones want your attention and, in typical fashion, they’re being a tease about it. Last week, UK media went into hyperdrive when an ad for “Hackney Diamonds” appeared in the London newspaper Hackney Gazette. Posing as an ad for “specialists in glass repair”, it was fooling no fans.
The tiny tongue and lips logo dotting the I, names of their most popular songs such as “Satisfaction” and “Gimme Shelter”, the allusion to their ongoing Diamonds tour, the small “Estd 1962” at the bottom—these were all red herrings, bringing watchers to the conclusion that a new album from The Rolling Stones is on its way.
Of course, this is exciting news. If this is indeed a new album coming in September 2023, it will mean new music from one of the greatest rock bands of all time after a significant gap. The last new single “Living In a Ghost Town”, arrived in 2020, an apocalyptic song that mirrored the mood of a Covid-ridden world. Before that, was 2016’s Blue & Lonesome, an album made up entirely of covers of songs of their peers from half a decade prior. And before that, was A Bigger Bang, way back in 2005.
In the interim, The Rolling Stones have toured incessantly. They’ve kept their legacy alive in cultural memory by way of stage antics, feud rumours, solo projects, collaborations with younger artists (including Taylor Swift), and being their best beastly rockstar versions.
You wouldn’t know it by the looks of them, but Mick Jagger turned 80 a month ago; Keith Richards will also do so in December this year. Two founding members, Charlie Watts and Brian Jones, have passed on. Current members Ronnie Wood is the youngest, and Bill Wyman, the legendary bassist, is closer to 90 at this point. The band itself is now 60 years old.
So who really cares about a band of old geezers whose best years are, really, behind them? Especially now, when hip hop, not rock music, is the soundtrack of our lives? Especially here in India, where the broader youth’s musical awakening—that is listening to music outside of Bollywood—has happened only in the last decade? What does The Rolling Stones’ fandom look like today?
Of course, it looks like a patchwork of boomers, Gen Xers and millennials who all came of age as rock and roll evolved from its blues roots into a rad, rebellious sound of the counterculture. These are the people who either witnessed (or were heavily influenced by) the flower children, the punk rockers, the British Invasion.
These were the people who flocked to Indian rock festivals like the GIR. These were the second generation of India’s own rockstars and rock music fans, who learned to shred their axes, yowl and growl on mics, mosh in pits, from legends like The Rolling Stones and the culture they spawned.
But in the case of The Rolling Stones, it wasn’t just second-hand exposure. Jagger, Richards & Co. were one of the first international bands to put India on their international tour map. (Never mind that they did it well past their prime as well, just like all the 2000s-era boy bands making a beeline for India today. After Backstreet Boys, there’s Blue and Ronan Keating coming up this festival season.)
In 2003, The Rolling Stones played Palace Grounds, Bengaluru, and CCI Stadium, Mumbai, as part of the massive Licks world tour. Thousands turned up for this rare event—rare even in retrospect, given that we continue to wonder why India’s not on major international artists’ radar even today.
According to reviews archived on The Rolling Stones’ fansite, It’s Only Rock & Roll, Mumbai had a bigger crowd than Bengaluru; 30,000 people turned up despite the April heat—in ties, Stones tees and bandanas. Jagger spoke a lot in Hindi. Richards made jokes about being able to smell pot, and requested that some be sent to him.
The setlist was 20 of their greatest hits (and in four decades, they had accumulated a lot of them). Funnily enough, the reviewers complained about sound and tech—all too familiar to the present-day live music lover living in India. But Jagger’s moves and Richards’ guitars (he played no less than 10) more than made up for it. The crowd went for the nostalgia value, sure; but they came away wowed by the prowess of these guys, then in their 60s, and still masters of their craft. In short, satisfaction was got. A core fanbase was formed.
In the ensuing years, Mick Jagger, among the most famous Indophiles in the world, has kept his connection to the Subcontinent alive. He attended the inaugural edition of the Jodhpur-RIFF festival in 2007, and loved it so much that he came on board as international patron the next year. “India is a fast-changing country,” Jagger told The Economic Times in 2007. “Indian music is a whole mosaic of forms, which is fantastic. I have listened to Bengali, Gujarati and Rajasthani folk music, which is very nice.”
He was also struck by the “co-existence of a lot of cultures side by side”. “You would see a guy with a camel standing in front of a shopping mall!” he said to ET. Jagger has since visited India several times, posting about his adventures in “tuk-tuks”, with food and more on social media. In the 2010s, there were even rumours of him wanting to invest in property in Rajasthan—enamoured as he was by the golden landscape and cultural richness of the desert state.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are personalities larger than the music, and the affection for these “geezer rockers” is abundant. But given that there has been little new music to celebrate and even less in-person exposure, The Rolling Stones’ fandom has naturally dwindled. At least in India—elsewhere, Variety reported in 2021, that they had the most high-profile tour of the year, earning over $100 million that year.
2023 has been a year of big moves for The Rolling Stones, though. Other than those major birthdays and the possibility of this new album, The Rolling Stones also officially joined TikTok in January. Along with the Hall of Famers, comes the band’s complete catalogue to the video platform, available to anyone who wants to add a bit of the rock n roll to their own cooking or dance videos.
TikTok and Instagram Reels have demonstrated the incredible possibility of reviving old music and elevating it to top-trending status—evidenced in the prominence of the late Lata Mangeshkar and Kishore Kumar’s voice on short videos. While a lot of The Rolling Stones’ biggest hits and some truly deep cuts continue to be licensed in film soundtracks—“Doom and Gloom” in Avengers: Endgame; “Gimme Shelter” in The Departed, “Sweet Virginia” in Knives Out—there’s little that can compare to that viral spark when it comes to connecting with Gen Z in 2023.
With all this action, The Rolling Stones might really pull off that rare thing—a direct connection with a generation thrice removed from them. This doesn’t happen often. The venerated Italian composer and music producer Giorgio Moroder went on a world tour at 70 after French electronic duo Daft Punk brought him back with Random Access Memories.
Stranger Things brought English songstress Kate Bush back into orbit. The legendary Indian disco-era singer-songwriter Asha Puthli, 78, is touring again, having recently collaborated with the American artist of Indian origin Raveena Aurora. Which is to say, it isn’t impossible. And The Rolling Stones, never ones to care too hard, might just be the next in line to have a new batch of teens screaming “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”— like a true rite of passage into adulthood.
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