Re: The Who Mailing List Digest V4 #243

[sethian@math.berkeley.edu (James Sethian)]

The Rolling Stones have *always* been about money first, second, and 
third. Go track through their records, starting with Miss You, and you'll 
see an interesting trend: always six months behind the latest craze, 
trying to jump on the bandwagon.  The Stones do disco (Miss You), the 
stones do punk (shattered), the stones do S&M (undercover), the stones do 
soul (just my imagination) the stones do anti-gulf-war music (can't 
remember the name of that one they released about missles and weapons), 
it just goes on and on and on. 
   Their positioning is also brilliant; the Beatles are too clean - they 
position themselves as the "bad boys" - altamont is all their fault, 
and they position themselves as the "harbingers of the end of the 60's". 
They jump into anything that seems to have a spark of creativity, and 
crush it with mediocrity. 

   In short, the Rollings Stones are the Microsoft of rock. Why do you think
they traded songs ("start me up")?

                     James Sethian
                     Dept. of Mathematics
                     U.C. Berkeley
                     math.berkeley.edu