The Rolling Stones’ new album hits at number two on the Billboard 200 this week. The debut–with a mere 150,000 copies sold on a wave of massive hype–is considered to be an embarrassment within the industry. War-horses like Pink Floyd sell nearly half a million copies their first days out, debut at number one, and stay there. The Stones, by contrast, could muster barely half the sales of The Lion King sound track, and Voodoo Lounge will drop quickly as word hits the street what an ever-lovin’ dog the album is.
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Qualitywise, the album is painfully similar to its immediate predecessors, Dirty Work (1986) and Steel Wheels (1989), and to Mick Jagger’s various solo albums, notably Wandering Spirit (1993). It’s also similar to these albums in the way the mainstream press has reviewed it. So many years on, a rigid pattern is apparent in Rolling Stones record reviews: any new album is by definition a masterwork displaying that the band can rock in top form once again, and previous records (which were hailed as returns to top form on their release) are, 1984-style, dismissed as tired. To drive the point home, the reviewer compares the new album to past glories, most often Some Girls. The extraordinarily rare voice of dissent tends to be halfhearted: when Time’s Jay Cocks damned Steel Wheels with faint praise, for example, but did it in the midst of a glowing cover story on the band entitled “Rock Rolls On.”
While this progression is theoretically infinite, it may eventually strain the bounds of human journalism. It’s possible reviewers will eventually agree that some future Stones album is better than Some Girls, and then compare it to the previous watershed, probably Exile on Main St. (As the quotations below demonstrate, this process may have already begun.) Exile will hold for a while, and then even earlier benchmarks (Beggar’s Banquet, Aftermath) will be cited and then breeched. Finally, inevitably, England’s Newest Hit Makers, the Stones’ U.S. debut, will rise and ultimately fall in the face of their extraordinary continuing artistic growth. All of which can only mean one thing: the band’s best work is ahead of them.
Steel Wheels
“The Rolling Stones have pulled it together for another end-of-the-decade hat trick [sic], a la Let It Bleed and Tattoo You. Steel Wheels is easily the most focused, committed and vital Stones release in a decade.” –Vic Garbarini, Playboy, December, 1989
“Jagger has done himself proud….Wandering Spirit has all the shiftless heft of a Rolling Stones album….Sticky Fingers with a manicure….Time, all of a sudden, is on his side again.” –Jay Cocks, Time, February 15, 1993
“It is invigorating indeed to be slapped round the ears by the new Stones CD. This is the most exciting and invigorating work the venerable Stones have produced in a decade….Nice one, lads.” –Guy Cooper, Newsweek, July 18, 1994
