"I'm a Monkey": The Influence of the Black American Blues Argot on the Rolling Stones

Abstract

No OTHER ROCK GROUP, not even the Beatles, has influenced and affected the attitudes and expressions of the i96os and 1970s youthor counter-culture as completely as the Rolling Stones. Originating in the midst of the British middleclass in the London area, they dropped out in the early '6os to spend their time playing a decidedly ungenteel American Negro music known as rhythm and and went on to become the primary artistic figures in a mass transfusion of American urban Negro attitudes into the dominant white cultures of both America and Britain. Rejecting the banalities of their own culture and adopting instead the more realistic, if less noble and comfortable, attitudes of the black American ghetto resident, the Stones laid the foundation for the counter-culture by translating these black attitudes into an attractive image for alienated white youth. The importance of this black blues influence is nowhere more apparent than in the argot of the Stones' lyrics, and an examination of the existence of a black lexicon in the Stones' lyrics provides a unique method of studying the Stones' acceptance and extension of black urban cultural attitudes. An argot both results from the existing social situation of a sub-culture and provides a reinforcing frame of reference for the attitudes of that sub-culture. The urban Negro sub-culture of America arose in the midst of a basically hostile dominant white culture. Prevented from succeeding within the dominant culture or according to its standards-either in terms of silky blond hair or executive power-the Negro had to come to terms with this oppressive situation and create an alternative value structure that would suit his own basic role-that of the outcast.