‘Some Girls’: The Rolling Stones song their label wanted to pass on
At this point, The Rolling Stones have earned the right to do whatever the hell they want when they go into the studio. They stopped caring about what the record company had in mind years ago, and even if they released tapes of mindless jamming that they made back in 1974, there’s a good chance that collectors would still be aching to hear the subtle touches in their playing as they made their way towards making classics like ‘Angie’ or ‘It’s Only Rock n’ Roll’. Even for a band that had stone-cold classics under their belt, the Stones still couldn’t call their own shots in their prime, either.
Then again, that’s always been the curse of any famous rock act. They may get the opportunity to have millions of fans screaming along to their tunes whenever they play, but in the background, they also have to make sure most of their suits can tolerate them, lest they say one thing out of line and get pressured into staying on the same path.
Granted, the Stones were always the kind of band to not go along with the program. Nothing that they did could have been considered wholesome compared to The Beatles, and even though they had their love of genres like blues and country, it wasn’t out of the question for them to take on different styles like baroque pop on Between the Buttons or psychedelic rock on Their Satanic Majesties Request.
But just because you can doesn’t mean you should, either. The Rolling Stones were musicians of many talents, but listening back to Some Girls, their attempts at disco on ‘Miss You’ is still one of the most unintentionally hilarious moments of their career. While their label was able to deal with a healthy dose of boogie fever from the band, ‘Some Girls’ was where they put their foot down.
This is strange because the whole thing sounds like a typical Stones tune. Keith Richards is in fine form as always, but looking at some of the lyrics, the band’s higher-ups were hesitant to make something that had a questionable stance towards women, especially when Mick Jagger sings about how women do everything to please him and the promiscuity of women of particular races that he has come across.
While everything was meant to be in good fun, Jagger remembered their label trying to get the song banned from release before the record hit shelves, saying, “Atlantic (Records) tried to get us to drop it, but I refused. I’ve always been opposed to censorship of any kind, especially by conglomerates. I’ve always said, you can’t take a joke, it’s too fucking bad.”
But did anyone expect anything less of Jagger around this time? This was the same person who wrote something that was overtly racist like ‘Brown Sugar,’ so the idea of him not writing something that went one step further in terms of racial insensitivity would have been like giving Richards a delicate slap on the wrist for smoking and expecting him not to do it again.
Even though ‘Some Girls’ did fit in with the band’s reputation of being bad boys, there comes a point where it starts going too far over the line for most people. It’s one thing to make a song that toes the line of what is allowed on the radio, but whereas the erotic lines in ‘Start Me Up’ work well, making baseline assumptions about an entire race of people is the definition of prejudice.
