The travelling exhibition shows how Mick, Keith and the guys changed popular music forever—but avoids discussing how they used cultural colonization to do so.
Billboards, newspaper headlines and posters plastered in public spaces in 1970s England displayed the nation’s raised hackles through a blistering rhetorical question: “Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?” The lads were banned from their home country for either drug use or tax evasion (depending who you ask), and were not only rock stars incarnate but the fullest manifestation of what the devil’s music could do. My own entanglement with problematic baes Mick, Keith, Ronnie and Charlie had long been a secret: I’d only wear my Rolling Stones T-shirts around the house and I’d avoid playing my scuffed-up copies of Tattoo You and Beggars Banquet when friends were around…