The seventieth album: #70 The Rolling Stones - Aftermath
My version of Aftermath starts with a song I've praised before (and reminisced as I remembered the shows I watched with it), Paint It Black, and goes up and down from there. Stupid Girl is hard and loud (with a troubling message, but perhaps a sign of the time and culture). Then we get Lady Jane, slower, more sensitive, and more baroque rather than hard. Hearing this come from the same group, on the same album, feels like quite a change. One that makes sense from their blues roots, it's a different direction for the music to go into.
While the album features several songs about relationships, they are not love songs. Not musically, for the most part, but also in a lot of the lyrics. There are songs about power struggles, about finding a place in the world, about more raw sexual encounters and generally the more real questions that often come up. It's more personal - even if a lot of it is satirical or taking things on from other people or works. The revolutionary spirit of the time shows through here, as does the aggressive tone, and in a way this feels like the Stones might have invented something slightly different and created that path forward that kept them going for a long time. Not as inventive as the Beatles, maybe, but on a creative course that lasted for longer.