Jagger and Richards have ‘previous’ for lyrics guaranteed to shock modern ears

‘The implicit racism, misogyny and references to slavery, to put it mildly, raise an eyebrow in these sensitive times’

‘But while the group might be taking it out for now, you know Mick – always teasing – added: We we might put it back in’

It has only taken 50 years for the simmering concerns over The Rolling Stones’ Brown Sugar to finally come to the boil. The Stones, it has been reported, have dropped the song from their performances, in the face of offending sensibilities. You might call it self-cancellation.

For anyone who might have missed it, here’s how the first verse of the song begins. “Gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields/sold in the market down in New Orleans /Scarred old slaver knows he’s doing alright/hear him whip the women just around midnight.”

Brown Sugar has been the second most frequently performed song in the Stone’s repertoire, behind Jumpin’ Jack Flash, since it was released in 1971. The group last performed it at a show in Miami in 2019.

But Mick Jagger, who is presently touring with the Stones in America on their – in the circumstances ironically named – No Filter tour has said that the group will “take that one out for now and see how it goes”.

Is Brown Sugar a song that should be subject to cancellation? The implicit racism, misogyny and references to slavery certainly, to put it mildly, raise an eyebrow in these sensitive times, although surely few in the Stones’ audience would be engaged in a semantic study of the lyrics as the song was being performed, most likely joining in lustily on the line “how comes it tastes so good!” Like so much that supposedly causes offence, most people wouldn’t notice it until it was pointed out to them.

The Stones, of course, have history here. There’s the song Midnight Rambler, which references the Boston Strangler, Albert Desalvo, who murdered 13 women in the early Sixties, adding “I’ll stick my knife right down your throat, baby/and it hurts!”

Then there’s Under my Thumb, a hymn to coercive control, about “the squirmin’ dog who’s just had her day / Under my thumb, a girl who has just changed her ways.”

Transgression, of course, has always been a part and parcel of rock music. The Stones started out as what Paul Mccartney, in an interview last week with the New Yorker, described as “a blues cover band” – a genre in which any number of songs have flirted, not always ambiguously, with that most transgressive of subjects – underage sex, none more famously than Good Morning Little School Girl, with its lyric “Good morning little schoolgirl...i wanna ball you all night long.”

First recorded by the blues singer and harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson as Good Morning School Girl in 1937, the song has been recorded countless times by, among others, The Yardbirds and Ten Years After.

Any number of rock songs have hinted, not so subtly, at the subject of underage sex. Rod Stewart’s popular Tonight’s The Night, with the lyric ‘Don’t say a word, my virgin child, just let your inhibitions run wild’, recorded in 1976 when Stewart was 31 sounds... let’s say, a little predatory – barely mitigated by the fact that the “virgin” in the song’s video is, improbably, Britt Ekland, who is three years older than Stewart.

The list of possible cancellations is endless. The 1974 hit Kung Fu Fighting with its reference to “funky Chinamen from funky Chinatown” named “Billy Chin and little Sammy Chung” would almost certainly be targeted for using names that reinforce Asian stereotypes. Curiously, there are areas of rap music that trade in homophobia, misogyny and violence and where women are routinely described as “bitches”, “sluts” and “hoes”, and drill rap which, at its most extreme, incites murder, have escaped censure.

And let’s not even mention the subject of cultural appropriation, an argument that goes back to the earliest days of pop music, about white artists like Eric Clapton – and The Rolling Stones – accused of profiting from borrowing, or stealing, from black music. But was it appropriation or celebration? It’s an argument that refuses to go away. Only this week, Jesy Nelson, the former singer with Little Mix, was obliged to apologise for causing offence following a social media storm accusing her “blackfishing”, a form of cultural appropriation where a non-black person tries to appear black or mixed race, in the video for a new song Boyz. Nelson explained that she had been to Antigua before the shoot, which explained her darker skin tone.

Referring to Brown Sugar, as long ago as 1995 in an interview with Rolling Stone, Jagger said he ‘never would write that song now. I would probably censor myself ’.

But while the group may be “taking it out for now”, you know Mick – always teasing – he added: “We might put it back in.” Uh-oh.