So long Brown Sugar.

Keith Richards has lived long enough to become ideologically dangerous again.

An anthem of emancipation sung as one of the most popular dennunciation of the sexual violence which marked much of slavery in the US has been silenced. The Rolling Stones will not play Brown Sugar in their upcoming US tour because, well, it’s a US tour.

The dim lights of minds like the one exercised by Ian Bennan writing for the Chicago Tribune have mistaken the voice of the singer with the persona of the narrator. Most highschool literature teachers are tasked with explainind this distinction. Mr Brennan takes the song to be a hymn to rape. It is almost impossible to imaging that this much stupidity and intellectual ineptitude is honest:

“Imagine everyone in a sold-out stadium singing along joyfully to a tune glorifying slavery, rape, torture and pedophilia, with the entire chorus led by a hyper-gesticulating 75-year-old white male, centimillionaire. It sounds like something out of a dystopian horror film or a tale of 19th century-era evil.”

The fact that cultural literacy is considered anathema to the righteou raised fist of the man in the heartland and the seaboard, might go a long way to explain why Keith Richards, who probably did not think even he would live long enough to see a song that dennounces slavery be banned because it is sung by a person with the wrong ethnic features, was forced to explain to the American public:

"Didn't they understand this was a song about the horrors of slavery?"

No, Keith, no they did not.