The Rolling Stones are back on stage with their greatest hits, but the hit “Brown Sugar” is not on the veterans' current setlist due to concerns about the lyrics' impact in 2021.
Part of the album Sticky Fingers (1971), the group's tenth album, the single reached number one on the charts in the United States and Europe at the time and remains one of the band's best-known songs. Even so, "Brown Sugar" was removed from the band's new tour because of its controversial lyrics.
“I don’t know. I’m trying to figure out with the sisters exactly where the fight is. Didn’t they understand that this was a song about the horrors of slavery? But they’re trying to bury it. Right now, I don’t want to get into conflict with all that crap,” Keith Richards to the decision in an interview with the Los Angeles Times . “But hopefully we can resurrect this song in all its glory somewhere along the way.”
When commenting on the removal of the song from the setlist, Mick Jagger was less direct. “We’ve played ‘Brown Sugar’ every night since 1970, so sometimes you think, ‘Let’s take this one out for now and see what happens.’ We can put it back in [in the future],” he explained.
The first verse of the song refers to the sale of enslaved Black people (“Slave ship from the Gold Coast, headed for the cotton plantations / Sold in a market there in New Orleans / Old branded slave knows he’s doing well / Hear him whipping the women around midnight”), while the chorus suggests a relationship with a young Black woman, in a possible allusion to sexual abuse.
This interpretation is not unanimous. The song was written by Jagger, who explained it as a song about the "double combination of drugs and girls," according to the Society of Rock , since "brown sugar" can refer to pure heroin.
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