Anti-Climacus

Desert Island Disc #1: Exile on Main Street, The Rolling Stones

One of the unspoken rules of the internet is that any aesthetic product, no matter how objectively good, must have its detractors who insist that it cannot possibly have any value. Or, worse, that it is inferior to works that are themselves inferior, in objective point of fact. So it goes with this, the best of the Rolling Stones' albums by a far distance. The objection is usually this: the most famous song on the album is "Tumbling Dice," which is 'no one's favorite Rolling Stones song.' The song is brought up to be an unflattering comparison to the other usual candidates, Beggars Banquet ("Sympathy for the Devil"), Let It Bleed ("Gimme Shelter" and "You Can't Always Get What You Want") or Sticky Fingers ("Brown Sugar" or "Wild Horses"). But the objection misses the point: Exile isn't better because its highs are higher (though they might be) but because the lows are higher: there's no equivalent to "Jig-Saw Puzzle" (Beggars, though I love it), "Let It Bleed" (Let It Bleed, no one's favorite six-minute song with just two verses) or "Sister Morphine" (Sticky Fingers, because you probably shouldn't write songs about the dangers of doing drugs while doing the drugs mentioned in the song; this is the sort of mawkish sentimentality that the Stones do very poorly, and would taint Exile's "Sweet Black Angel" if anyone could tell it was actually a defense of Angela Davis without being explicitly told).

And it just so happens that the album also contains two of the most unreservedly happy of Stones songs: "Loving Cup," which does an impressive job of combining actual romantic sentiment and innuendo, and shifts effortlessly from acoustic folk to horn-based funk, and "Happy," not Keith's finest vocal turn, nor his best song with lead vocals, but the most irreducibly Keith--lifting from other sources, proclaiming a (believable) indifference to wealth or the lack thereof, and generally well-dispositioned towards life no matter what.

One of my finest pleasures as a whippersnap was waiting until my parents had left the house and then turning this album way, way up and listening to it from start to finish. Minus the parents, it remains one of my great pleasures. I'm not sure there's really anything else you can ask from an album.