An unexpected, timely moral breakthrough
The new single from the Rolling Stones is titled “Angry” because it’s the legendary band’s latest expression of the zeitgeist. Our ruling class never confesses its motives, yet rage and discord characterize today’s regime (as in “Dark Brandon” moments like the Philadelphia Independence Hall Reichstag address last September), and the Stones have found a way to explain it.
God knows why, but the Stones have updated their long-noted sympathy for the devil to articulate the contempt shown by government spokesmen such as Karine Jean-Pierre and John Kirby, Hillary’s nasty women, the Lincoln Brigade, and those sneering Beltway scoundrels who stole their group moniker “Crossfire Hurricane” from the Stones’ “Jumping Jack Flash.” The Stones return fire in “Angry” by making the omnipresent vitriol in our government and culture easy to grasp. “Angry” has no romantic subtext; being a Stones jam, it takes up where sex and empathy have faded. (“Don’t be angry with me.”) The Stones overshot this awareness in their last single, “Living in a Ghost Town” (2020), which tackled the social devastation of the Covid lockdowns so casually that no one noticed. That same year, Morrissey’s “Love Is On the Way Out” beat the Stones to the existential point, so what’s left is regret in response to daily conflict.
The metaphorical male/female, star/fan love story alluded to in “Angry” tells us that in spite of an apparent uniparty, there’s still grievous social division. The prioritization of race and gender identities means that no one is happy. Mick Jagger sings about anger the way he once sang about war, race, and sexual liberation, the moral preoccupations of the ’60s.
However, the circumstances behind “Angry” are different from what inspired “Gimme Shelter” (the Vietnam War). Given our dystopic reality, the Stones question everyday displays of anger — the godlessness that makes claims of “holding accountable” and the hypocrisy of a “humanitarian crisis” outright laughable.
“Angry” seeks shelter from polarization and a world where people give little thought to defamation and punitive actions beyond achieving vengeance and political satisfaction. The world was also different when Public Image Ltd recorded their own “Gimme Shelter,” the timeless anthem “Rise” (1986) during the Soviet–Afghan war, and John Lydon memorably sang, “Anger is an energy!” to explain Punk’s disillusionment as distinct from the Stones opportunistic decadence. (Lydon’s piercing protestation was as powerful as Merry Clayton’s voice cracking on “Gimme Shelter.”)
And there’s a difference between Jagger’s resentful swagger and Lydon’s valiant jeremiad. Lydon didn’t confuse personal animus with social responsibility but clarified his moral intent: “I could be wrong / I could be right / I could be black / I could be white.” The Stones may have lost the timely sensibility that defines pop stardom, but in the wake of the Stones myth, Lydon has become one of the most extraordinary ethicists pop music has ever heard. Known for his show of anger, he never disavows it, and that honesty makes his art crucial for this era of deceptive pop politics.
“Angry” leads Hackney Diamonds, the Stones’ first album in 18 years, by identifying universal displeasure. There’s no urgency to the tune itself, only a spot-on realization of the problem — by acknowledging the hatred within political anger. The Stones avoid sanctimonious bromides or the idiocy of “hate crimes.” Yet the ambivalent artists who could follow “Sympathy for the Devil” with the blues-based angelic chorale “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” face up to the diabolism being disguised as political rationalizations. Then, they reprove it. Jagger and Keith Richards show the wisdom of their respective 80 and 79 years — younger than their peers Nancy Pelosi (83) and Mitch McConnell (81).
Politicians use self-righteousness to disguise their anger, which separates pols from artists. Political dishonesty, whether antisocial Antifa-ism or apathetic pacifism, has resulted in madness. Consider the Stones’ “Angry” a pop-song version of Hannah Arendt’s “the banality of evil.”