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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Rolling Stones drops hit ‘Brown Sugar’ from US tour

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The Rolling Stones has cut its popular track “Brown Sugar” from its US tour, at least for now, in the wake of criticism over its lyrics referring to slavery.

“You picked up on that, huh?” Keith Richards told the Los Angeles Times in a recent interview when asked about the song’s absence at the British band’s stadium shows.

Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones perform in St. Louis, Missouri during the British rock band's 'No Filter' 2021 North American tour.
Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones perform in St. Louis, Missouri during the British rock band's 'No Filter' 2021 North American tour.

“I’m trying to figure out with the sisters quite where the beef is. Didn’t they understand this was a song about the horrors of slavery? But they’re trying to bury it. At the moment I don’t want to get into conflicts,” the superstar told the paper.

“I’m hoping that we’ll be able to resurrect the babe in her glory somewhere along the track,” Richards, 77, added.

The gritty rock chart-topper officially released in 1971 opens with the lyric “Gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields” and references beating enslaved people, and sex with young enslaved women.

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In recent years magazine critics and others in the industry have criticized the song as “racist,” including one writer for New York Magazine who called the track “gross, sexist, and stunningly offensive toward black women.”

“We’ve played ‘Brown Sugar’ every night since 1970, so sometimes you think, We’ll take that one out for now and see how it goes,” frontman Mick Jagger told the LA Times.

“We might put it back in,” he said, adding “the setlist in a stadium show, it’s kind of a tough one.”

In 1995 Jagger told Rolling Stone magazine that “I never would write that song now.”

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