Foreign Tongues and Forked Tongues: Lou Waxman on the Rolling Stones, Selling Out, and $62 Vinyl

Rolling Stones’s twenty-seventh American album, Foreign Tongues, is fuel for barroom debate.  Not whether its $62 price tag is a bridge too far for the baseline price for new vinyl orwhether new vinyl has jumped the shark.  Not Beatles vs Stones.  It is the Stones.  Case closed.  No, the debate that Foreign Tongues speaks into existence is:  What was the Rolling Stones last good album?

For years Lou had a set in Stones opinion on this debate.  Lou was a very Catholic in his tastes.  The last great Stones album was definitively Exile on Main Street, the capstone to the Stones’ greatest era, the Mick Taylor years:  Beggar’s Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile, and Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out.  That was all the Stones Lou needed.  That was all the Stones Lou owned.

Then The Vogue opened and Lou was suddenly confronted with all the later Stones records that he supposedly despised.  When a celebrity is caught committing adultery, most people gasp and wonder how such a thing could happen.  “I would never do such a horrid thing.”  In most cases, this is because the opportunity never arose.  Sure, any dude can turn down the advances of a less than appealing soccer Mom from the neighborhood.  That is not being faithful.  That is never being truly tempted.  What if Samantha Fox came up to Lou in a dive bar and said, “Naughty girls need love too.”  This would never happen, of course.  If only because Samantha Fox is a lesbian.  Any woman not attracted to Lou is a lesbian.  Or has self-respect.  Or good taste.  There are a lot of reasons women are not attracted to Lou to be honest.  But seriously, could Lou or any man (or woman, women are as weak as men, don’t get it twisted) turn down the dozens of advances that any C-List, let alone A-List, celebrity is faced with on a daily basis.  If you can consistently say no in such a situation, that is the very definition of being faithful.  To have faith, one must be tested.  Lou thinks that is in the Bible somewhere.

Well, Lou is a weak man.  At The Vogue, Lou quickly came face to face with Mick Jagger on the cover of Goats Head Soup.  By the way, great album cover.  A riff on Sticky Fingers, right?  Of course, Lou bought it and took it home.  Lou dropped the needle and was forced to admit that Soup was the last good Rolling Stones album.  Then came It’s Only Rock and Roll.  Same thing.  With those two albums, there were still whiffs of Mick Taylorriffs, so that made Lou feel a little bit better about things.  Surely, Black and Blue sucks.  Ron Wood is no Mick Taylor.  Or Brian Jones.  Woodsy was just in the band because he was asshole buddies with Keef.  By all accounts, Woodsy is a fun hang, but come on.  A step down in the guitar god department.  

Nope, Lou liked it.  Good album.  For years, Lou had been fighting his attraction to Some Girls.  Buying the album, Lou could fight it no longer.  It is not only a good album, it is a great one.  Surely, that is the endpoint.  The Stones were finished by this point, right?  Wrong.  Lou bought Emotional Rescue and had to admit to himself that the record will be played more than once with enjoyment.  When will it end?  When will the Stones truly suck?  Not with Tattoo You.  That album is good too.  Geez.

And that is where it currently ends for Lou.  Lou can say that Tattoo You is the last good Rolling Stones album.  But can Lou say this with any confidence or authority?  The fact is that Lou does not own any Stones albums after Tattoo You.  Undercoveris the next album in the discography.  At some point, these lateralbums will be in the bins at The Vogue, and you can be assured that Lou will buy them.  The same goes for Dirty Work and Steel Wheels and on down the list.  

For what it is worth, The Vogue has been expanding Lou’s narrow tastes ever since it opened.  With Black Sabbath, Lou was adamant that Sabotage was the last good album.  Then he got a copy of Never Say Die!.  (Still looking for Technical Ecstasy.  The copy Lou saw at The Vogue was warped.  Is that because the album is so hot or is it a steaming platter of crap?  The jury is still out.)  Say what you like (most people hate this album), Lou listens to it every couple of weeks.  So, that means that Black Sabbath was good as long as Ozzy was around.  Right?  That is what Lou thought until he bought Heaven and Hell and Mob Rules with Ronnie James Dio.  Fuck, if Lou didn’t like those too.  So, does that mean there are no bad Black Sabbath albums?  Could be.  Lou is on the lookout for the later stuff and has his ears open for a stinker.  There is a term for what Lou just did here.  Ears can’t detect a smells.  Lou was an English major.  He should know this.  It is like Winona Ryder in Reality Bites with irony.  Sad.  But Lou does have synesthesia.  Lou’s wife often says that Lou can’t hear shit.  But Lou can.  He just ignores it.

The same goes for Led Zeppelin.  Physical Graffiti was the last good album.  Lou felt pretty confident about that.  Well, have you listened to Presence and In Through the Out Door?  They are great.  Lou listens to In Through the Out Door more than Led Zeppelin IV.  Seriously.  Listening to it makes Lou very sad about John Bonham.  The band still had fuel in the tank.  It would have been better if Bonzo had not guzzled all of it.  Lou wonders what direction they might have taken next.  They were still innovating and changing.  (If you are interested, the same goes for The Doors with LA Woman.  They still rocked even if Jim Morrison looked more like Lou than The Lizard King at the end.  Jimbo looked kinda like a bloated boa constrictor after eating a large mammal.)  Lou will come out and say it.  Even Coda is good.  Led Zeppelin never put out a bad album.  Not one.

So, Lou, what did you think of Foreign Tongues?  Was it any good?  Lou can’t tell you.  All the Stones albums that Lou once suspected were crap were not $62.  They were like $10.  Lou will take a chance on just about anything that is $10.  So, in the debate about “Is $62 too much for a slab of new vinyl?”  Lou would have to answer in the affirmative.  Lou suspects it is probably a good album.  In Lou’s experience, the Rolling Stones are always good.   But what a $62 price point signals for the future of new vinyl releases is not so good.  It is bad.

This kind of touches on something Lou always thinks about when he listens to Tattoo You.  Lou is not a tattoo guy.  Sure, Lou like a tattoo on a pretty woman as much as the next guy.  Even a bad tattoo.  Especially a bad tattoo on a baddie.  

Heartbreaker

Is the

Standard tattoo

Of the

Porn ingénue

Should that change

To Homemaker

If it’s MILF porn

That you do

Or

Tattoos on

A pornstar

Yes or no

It can

Be debated

But as

Time goes

It’s a mark

That shows

She’s become

Outdated

 

But when it comes down to it, Lou hates tattoos.  Lou knows this because Lou would never get one himself.  In the current cultural environment, Lou is seemingly one of the only people who does not have a tattoo.  This has everything to do with his generation.  Lou is Generation X through and through.  It has been argued that members of this generation eschew tattoos due to a fear of commitment or a lack of confidence in the future or some such shit.  Not for Lou.  Lou will never get a tattoo because Lou has a complicated relationship with selling out and branding.  A tattoo is a brand.  It is like wearing a t-shirt or trucker hat with a logo on it.  It is like walking around with a sandwich board on and not getting paid for it.

Tattoos

Break Lou’s

Golden Rule

Don’t sell out

If you work it

You are a tool

Tats are merely

Advertisements

That you’re cool

Tattoos are merely bar codes for scanning.  In a glance someone can pull up all your information.  William Burroughs and Georges Bataille did not have tattoos.  And they are two of the biggest freaks Lou knows.  That is good enough for Lou.  

What Lou likes about the publications of the Mimeo Revolution is that they cannot be scanned.  They say fuck you to all those assholes with scanners out there who know nothing about books.  It has been argued that the end of the Mimeo Revolution was due to the shift in technology to photocopiers (which resulted in zines) and the rise of Ronald Reagan (which cut funding to the arts and waged war on the Sixties).  For Lou, the Mimeo Revolution ended in about 1967, when there developed a bureaucracy around the little magazine in the form of committees and government funding.  What made the Mimeo Revolution great was that it was DIY and flourished despitesevere financial constraints.  This forced creativity and innovation.  Once bureaucratic money became available, the little magazines were encouraged to standardize and become less self-reliant.  Thus, death.  ISBN codes are an epitaph.  As are tattoos.  Writing on oneself is a short cut to actually writingsomething transgressive or meaningful.  To say nothing of actually doing anything.

Generation X was the last generation to have a strong aversion to selling out and a strong belief in authenticity.  There are several good books on this topic.  Lou recommends Sellout:  The Major Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore (1994-2007) by Dan Ozzi and Faking It:  The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor.  Nobody believes in this stuff anymore.  People think it is naïve.  Even those who preach authenticity do it inauthentically.  Seeming authentic is a primary means to sell out.  That is why everybody has a tattoo.  They are selling out and faking it.  

Lou secretly hates the Rolling Stones as much as he loves them.  They are the very definition of selling out and the inauthentic.  That the Stones are sell outs is beyond question.  The cost of Foreign Tongues is proof.  But the Stones at their seemingly most authentic, their love of the blues, is actually completely inauthentic.  The Vogue just acquired a cache of blues records.  Lou bought one by Mississippi Fred McDowell and Sleepy John Estes.  This is authentic blues.  (Or is it Lou?  This is the blues that Alan Lomax and white folkies from the 1960s thought was authentic.  Lou is aware of this.  Lou read Faking It.  He also read Escaping the Delta:  Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues by Elijah Wald.  Have you?)  The Rolling Stones cannot reach this level of authenticity by birth and by geography.  Can anybody?  Does authenticity actually exist?  What does it mean for Gen-X to believe in it?  As Norm MacDonald would say, it is a thorny issue.  Lou doesn’t have a firm grasp on authenticity and selling out, which is why he is always reading books about them.  

On a side note, Mick Jagger recently went viral by calling out Bruce Springsteen for making political statements as part of his stage show.  Mick believes entertainers should entertain.  Shut up and dance, Bruce!!!  That is all well and good.  Lou hates an entitled pop star telling him what to do or think as much as the next guy.  But Lou also hates an entitled pop star telling Brucewhat not to do.  Shut up and dance, Mick!!!

So, fuck Mick Jagger, Lou is going to get political for a minute.  Here is what some might consider a hot take.  Lou thinks it is common sense.  Politicians, like serial killers, should not be able to make money from their crimes.  If John Wayne Gacy cannot sell his clown paintings, then Trump, Pelosi, or any politician,Democrat or Republican or whatever (looking at you Bernie Sanders and Ralph Nadar), should not be able to make money from their dubious legislation and policies.  Politicians should be banned from participating in the stock market.  No more seven figure book deals.  No more cushy jobs as lobbyists.  No more paid speeches to corporations and the like.  Like a monk, if you choose to be a politician, you should take a vow of poverty.  Politics should be a blue-collar job.  You are a laborer for the people, not profiting from them.  If politicians are allowed to profit from their office, all these earnings should be taxed at 90% or something.  Like the Beatles in 1965 were taxed 98% on their music royalties.  

There Lou said it.  So, fuck you, Mick.  Fuck you for being a sell out and trying to squeeze every last dollar out of your audience.  And fuck you for making so many good albums.  You are forcing Lou to buy them all.  Lou hates you.  Lou loves you.  Lou is speaking out of both sides of his mouth.  Is that a foreign tongue?  As for Foreign Tongues, Lou will no doubt go down to The Vogue and spend the $62.  Lou has a problem, but you all knew that already.  You have one too.

Suggested Sites and Sounds:

Foreign Tongues: Buy or Bye?:  The Rolling Stones - NEW ALBUM - Full Review ... Should You Buy This?

Rolling Stones Ranking:  Rolling Stones Studio Albums Ranking

Black Sabbath Ranking:  All the Best Pete:  Ranking the Studio Albums: Black Sabbath

Led Zeppelin Ranking – In Through the Outhouse Door:  LED ZEPPELIN | The Ultimate Ranking | 30 Greatest songs + Album ranking

Bad Tattoos by Oxymorons:  Funniest Tattoo Fails On The Internet - COMPILATIONBlac

On Gen-Xers Not Making a Mark:  Psychology of Gen X Who Never Got a Tattoo

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Authenticity for a New Generation:  The Ad:  the death of niche culture and "authenticity" - YouTube