Satisfaction obtained from a person’s own genitals is indicated by all kinds of playing including piano playing. (Freud 2001: 156)
A formulation pertinent to the angle taken in what follows appears in the concluding section of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema II: The Time Image:
The theory of the cinema does not bear on the cinema, but on the concepts of the cinema, which are no less practical, effective, existent than cinema itself. The great cinema authors are like the great painters or the great musicians: it is they who talk best about what they do. But, in talking, they become something else, they become philosophers or theoreticians – even Hawks who wanted no theories, even Godard when he pretended to distrust them. Cinema’s concepts are not given in the cinema. And yet they are cinema’s concepts, not theories about cinema. (Deleuze 1989a: 280)
What this clarifies is that my remarks are to be taken neither as a proposition about musical affect, nor as a proposition about music’s utility in approaching the question of affect. Instead – and I realize that I am shaving a point – what follows is an effort to read ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ as a thinking of affect in the musical idiom of rock-and-roll. As such, it picks up on the concept of the percussive field developed in my book Percussion: Drumming, Beating Striking (2002) while shifting attention away from the sonic incarnation of skin and toward that aspect of incarnation that folds it in with what has been deemed a certain pre-conscious sensuousness. To be sure, through Didier Anzieu’s concept of the ‘skin ego’, Percussion engages processes caught up in the constitution of a subject of affect, the ‘I’ affected by, in this case, the lack of satisfaction. But the aim here is to frame the matter differently. To frame the questions Jagger and Richards might be posing in terms of the debate pursued for many years now by the likes of Lauren Berlant, Patricia Clough, Brian Massumi, Eve Sedgwick and most recently Ruth Leys. The motivation for this reframing will at least be stated, if not fully clarified, in what follows.
In saying that this will not be an exercise in deploying music, and one song in particular, as a means by which to think about affect, I did not mean to suggest that considering in what way ‘Satisfaction’ thinks about affect is irrelevant. On the contrary, what urges us to shift from attending to how the song thinks about affect, to how the song articulates a sonic thinking of affect has much to do with the way the tune places this very prepositional shift before our eyes and ears. The song lyrics certainly posit a relation to a psychosomatic state called ‘satisfaction’, indeed the lyrics seem to talk incessantly about it, but precisely the grammatical misstep of the double negative – like Rodney Dangerfield who couldn’t get no respect, The Stones can’t get no satisfaction – and especially the sonic iteration of this misstep points us toward processes in the song that extend beneath and beyond what it appears to be about, processes it seems rather to be made of. In this sense, ‘Satisfaction’ puts in play a relation that has assumed interrogative form in the wake of what Clough and Berlant call ‘the affective turn,’ namely, ‘what’s the difference between affect and emotion’, a formulation I have selected and combined so as to contain the grammatical misstep that de Man once famously teased out of the dialogue from All in the Family (1973), where ‘what’s the difference’ simultaneously invokes and revokes the articulation of a difference.
There is broad consensus that although ‘Satisfaction’ was not the first Jagger and Richards composition that was a hit – ‘Last Time’ holds this distinction (‘As Tears Go By’ was a hit for Marianne Faithfull) – it was the composition whose popularity (both in the US and in the UK) generated ‘The Rolling Stones’ as a band not merely adept, even superb, at covering songs written by others, largely Black R&B artists from the US, but a band with a ‘sound of its own’. One might even say that it is with ‘Satisfaction’ that Brian Jones’s vision of the Stones – as precisely a crack R&B cover band – definitively began to fade away. Doubtless, for this reason (among others to be sure) ‘Satisfaction’ and its sonic double, ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ are routinely on the playlist when the Stones tour or perform for Martin Scorsese. In Percussion I make much of the racial dimension of the dermal politics of ‘covering’, and while it matters a great deal here – the Stones come to own the name they poached from Muddy Waters, by precisely shedding the cover of blackness – I want to cite Richards’s account of the song’s genesis from his recent autobiography, Life:
I was between girlfriends at the time, in my flat in Carlton Hill, St. John’s Wood. Hence maybe the mood of the song. I wrote ‘Satisfaction’ in my sleep. I had no idea I had written it, it’s only thank God for the little Philips cassette player. The miracle being that I looked at the cassette player that morning and I knew I had put a brand-new tape in the previous night, and I saw it was at the end. Then I pushed rewind and there was ‘Satisfaction.’ It was just a rough idea. There was just the bare bones of the song, and it didn’t have that noise because I was on acoustic. And forty minutes of me snoring. [. . .] Mick wrote the lyrics by the pool in Clearwater, Florida, four days before we went into the studio and recorded it, first at Chess, in Chicago, an acoustic version, and later with the fuzz tone at RCA in Hollywood. (Richards 2011: 195–6)
Later in the text Richards makes explicit what is hinted at here when he writes: ‘It’s like “Satisfaction.” You just dream it, and suddenly it’s in your hands’ (ibid.: 310). Put differently, ‘Satisfaction’ is oneric. It is a dream song not simply in the sense of a career-generating ditty for which one might be compelled to thank one’s deity, but in the sense of a composition resulting from what Freud would call ‘dream work’. Technically speaking, and this despite the fact that Freud typically emphasizes the transposition of dream thought into pictures, the primary process most salient in Richards’s account is that of the ‘considerations of representability’, that is, the somnambulistic rendering of a dream thought in the medium of musical sound. Although one is entitled to doubt the reliability of Richards’s memory – he has struggled with alcoholism and heroin much of his adult life – he asks that we accept the notion that, while asleep, he picked up an acoustic guitar (he claims earlier in Life to have slept with his first one), turned on his bedside cassette player, and played the ‘riff’, the three-note ostinato that forms the melodic kernel of the song. My epigraph suggests strongly that the oneric has here slipped into the onanistic (‘you dream it and suddenly it’s in your hands’), but surely this barely scratches the surface of the recording.
Richards has also explained that, in addition to the riff, he came to Clearwater (indeed to the hotel that is now the headquarters of the Church of Scientology!) with what turns out to be the refrain or chorus of the song, the ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’. This rendering of the ‘mood’ of the song – the being between girlfriends – urges us to think in what way the riff, the melodic kernel, somehow repeats the negation of the negation in the refrain. I do not mean to suggest that the rest of Jagger’s contribution (the lyrics) is irrelevant or uninteresting – the line that evokes the dissatisfying satisfaction of white, not clean but white, shirts is one I will revisit – but frankly too much has already been made of the linguistic register of the song, including, of course, the once scandalous ‘losing streak’, read as an allusion to menstruation (Time 1966: 57). I then turn stubbornly, insistently to the improbable rebus – the sound/word figure that drives the song beyond its ending into its fade. Indeed, like the drive itself, the song escapes the recording apparatus that simply flags after a certain point.
This analysis has, perhaps predictably, been both facilitated and obstructed, by the ‘unofficial release’ in 2010 of ‘2120 South Michigan Avenue’, a collection of the Chess recordings made by the Rolling Stones on 10 and 11 June 1964 followed by two ‘bonus’ sessions; one from the fall of 1964, and the other from the summer of 1965. According to Richards, this last is the session, on the ‘hallowed ground’ of Chess Records, during which ‘Satisfaction’ was first committed to acetate. This is the so-called acoustic version, the one with Jones on harmonica, recorded almost immediately after the sojourn in Clearwater, the recording of a dream song that had travelled from London, to Clearwater, to Chicago, to the room where, as Richards puts it, ‘everything we listened to was made’ (2011: 174). The improbable rebus has become a blanched echo. Now, if it makes sense to say that this recording has also obstructed my work it is because the track of ‘Satisfaction’ is garbled. Beyond the general dissatisfaction voiced by Richards and Jagger about this version (too folk rocky, etc.), the actual recording is spliced together out of other recordings. Indeed, the liner notes that accompanied ‘2120’ acknowledge and attempt to compensate for this by referring the listener to the performance of the song on Shindig! later that year, suggesting that the recording to which the band lip synchs (yes, even the Stones) on the show is the Chess version. A version of this performance is currently available on YouTube, indeed the screen captures that follow are from this recording.
Much of relevance passes before and through one in listening to this track, but the obvious problem with the assertion made in the liner notes to ‘2120’, is that this is clearly not the Chess recording. We know this because while acoustic guitar is audible on the track (as is tambourine) this is not the acoustic, folk-rocky version with Jones on harmonica. This version is the RCA recording, the one recorded in Los Angeles later in 1965, the one with – as Richards put it in the reconstruction of his dream – ‘that noise’. He is referring here to the signature timbral quality or mood of the three-note ostinato when played on a Fender telecaster (Richards says it was ‘Malcolm’) through a Vox AC30 with, and this is crucial, a Gibson Maestro fuzz tone. Apparently, while working in Los Angeles, a roadie for the Stones visited a local music store and bought the pedal as a lark. Richards patched it in, cranked it up and the rest is, well, history. Maybe even myth. In Life, Richards says that the next thing he knew of the song was when he heard it on the radio while touring in Minnesota.
This draws attention to something important. It points to the fact that when the Stones left Los Angeles there was sharp disagreement about whether ‘Satisfaction’ was, well … satisfactory. Richards thought not, Andrew Loog Oldham (their manager) thought it was. What was at issue was precisely ‘that noise’.
Although the acoustic version of ‘Satisfaction’ is routinely described as deriving from a 1960s folk idiom (Jagger was emphatic about this), Richards has always stressed something else about the tune. Specifically, he has always heard the riff as performed on brass, as if the tune was more of an R&B composition than a folk-rock song. Noting in Life that the song was hell to play on stage, he insists that the live cover of it by Otis Redding – where the riff is played on brass – oddly both convinced him that he was right, and inspired him to insist that the hellish song go onto the live playlist. This ‘I’m right, and wrong’, may have something to do with a passing observation about his guitar style that appears in Life, namely, ‘I always find myself playing horn lines’ (ibid.: 120), but it also points to the navel of the dream, the hole, the ‘noise’ that apparently dropped out due to considerations of representability. As noted, in the reconstruction, ‘that noise’ refers to the effect achieved through the use of the fuzz tone. But what seems clear is that the dispute over the RCA version included the matter of whether the fuzz tone was a satisfactory representation of the brass line onerically heard by Richards. What the fuzz tone provides is something like the sustain of a brass instrument with a bit of its metallic timbre, and in that sense the RCA version was superior, more fully realized, than the Chess recording, but even to the untrained ear the inscriptions of ‘that noise’ are very different.
Here we return to the dermal politics of the cover, to what earlier I referred to as the blanched echo reverberating between a dream in London and a room in Chicago. Setting aside, provisionally, the ‘god talk’ of ‘hallowed ground,’ ‘miracle’ and ‘God’ itself, what insists in the dream and in the tune, literally driving it to morph and develop, is what we might call the ‘sound of blackness’ perhaps even the ‘black-ground noise’ out of and against which the absence of ‘that noise’ appears. The room at 2120 South Michigan, the place where everything Richards listened to was made, is the place where ‘that noise’, precisely in its absence, prefigured the dissatisfaction generated by its presence in Los Angeles. Through a sonic articulation of what Freud called Nachträglichkeit or ‘afterwardness’, this vibration of presence and absence apparently hit Richards for the first time when he heard Otis Redding cover his song, when he recognized that his own formative blackness was what was ‘omitted’ from the dream song under the guise of the ‘noise’ that was absent even when it was present and present precisely in the signature effect that allowed the Stones to shed their cover band ambitions and begin becoming the ‘world’s greatest rock-and-roll band’. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I can’t get no satisfaction.
In saying this, and I have selected my words deliberately, I am cleaving to the Jakobsonian principle that because metalanguage arises whenever aesthetic practice gestures to confirm the sharing of a code, ‘Satisfaction’ is reflexive and in that sense both about and on itself. Or neither. I am not proposing that the satisfaction that cannot not be got, is really about race and not sex or commodity fetishism (the lyrics turn insistently to advertising on radio and television) – although now I hope the dissatisfying whiteness of the song’s white shirts has acquired a different, more resonant wrinkle – this would be pointless and silly. But I am proposing that we hear in the sound of this song a particular thinking of affect, a putting before us of the question: what’s the difference between affect and emotion? And, furthermore, that we recognize in the dissatisfying noise of the fuzz tone, the important role played by the ‘sounds of blackness’ – including the colloquial misstep of the double negative – in the formulation of this question.
Teasing this out will require attending more carefully to the sonic character of the tune. In the RCA version the song is performed in the key of E Major and it is in 4/4 or ‘common’ time. It is conspicuously not a 12-bar blues progression, indeed it eschews any sort of developmental logic (this is why it fades rather than ends), although Richards does drop in some recognizable blues licks here and there. The tune starts with the riff that leads us immediately into the chorus or refrain and then deftly climbs to rock back and forth between the verse pattern and the refrain as these are enchained and driven by the opening ostinato. The sole exception being – and as an exception it matters – the drum solos. There are three of them. The term solo now suggests the sort of flashy pyrotechnics once associated with Buddy Rich or Ginger Baker, but Watts’s solos could not be more different. In fact, they do not do anything more than continue. Essentially, Watts plays the same part he has been playing the entire song. It is the absence of the other instruments that, in simply dropping out, produces the solo that cannot otherwise be differentiated from the ensemble playing that both precedes and follows it. The part is also an interesting one. As if echoing the refusal of the 12-bar blues architecture, the beat refuses the standard backbeat of rock and roll. Instead, Watts plays steady quarter notes on the snare and kick drum and running eighth notes on the partially open high hat. The effect counted and writ large is: and one and two and three and four. There are no fills or embellishments of any kind and in this the drum part realizes what in the dream reconstruction Richards called the ‘bare bones’ of the song. Perhaps this is why the three solos are introduced with the lyric ‘no, no, no’ and concluded with the interpellative, ‘hey, hey, hey, hey’. They mark what I termed above the navel of the song, the hole around which the no and the hey, followed by the phatic, ‘that’s what I say’, circle.
In what way then does this think affect? Strictly speaking, of course, what Richards meant by the ‘bare bones’ of the song was the riff itself as part of the improbable rebus with the line, ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’. But from the point of view of the recording the drum part is even ‘barer’ than the riff. It engages in the perverse exercise of doing nothing but repeat. In relation to the riff this nullity is accented because what the riff does, and does so obstinately (whence, ‘ostinato’) is to climb up from the thrice repeated B to the thrice repeated D sharp only to fall back down to C sharp. Repeatedly. Giving way only to the chord pattern of the verses and then to the climb to the drum solos. The whole effect would be utterly mechanical where it not for Wyman’s nimble bass work and Jagger’s vocal delivery. That said, the song achieves a unique, even dynamic form of idleness: running in place, it thus coils around its own vibrant potential to affect and be affected.
Ruth Leys in her recent ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’ (2011) draws attention to issues that a discussion such as mine must address. Specifically, as her title states, she is concerned to criticize how the concept of affect has come to matter to scholarly work in the humanities and social sciences, especially work that deploys this concept to supplement the practice of ideology critique by including within it some non-rational, even non-cognitive, component. She takes special aim at Brian Massumi who sought, among many other things, to explain the efficacy of Ronald Reagan by appealing to his affective politics. Her critique is at once ingenious and perverse in that she shows that for Massumi, Connolly, Clough and others (although she is tellingly silent about Berlant) the non or even pre-rational concept of affect depends on a distinction between affect and emotion, a distinction that, for Leys, is demonstrably untenable. She makes two decisive claims: one, that affect theory is incoherent because it relies on a dualism it otherwise purports to overcome; and two, that the neuroscience affect theorists appeal to reads emotion as occupying the same pre-intentional space as affect, thus depriving affect theorists of their enabling distinction between affect and emotion.
Of the various conclusions that might be drawn from this discussion, one might certainly be that affect, by definition, cannot be thought. As an avatar of the pre-cognitive, of the ‘half second before’ intentionality, affect, whether distinguished from emotion or not, is not something ‘Satisfaction’, can think. Indeed, Leys goes out of her way to problematize the appeals to music one routinely finds in the publications of affect partisans. Now, given that I have precisely been asserting the opposite view throughout these remarks, some response to Leys is due.
My way off the horns of this dilemma is provided by Richards when, again in Life, he writes about the lyricist of ‘Satisfaction’: ‘Mick is really the most versatile bloke. It’s why I love him. He can hold a philosophical discussion with Jean-Paul Sartre in his native tongue’ (Richards 2011: 13). According to Jerry Hall (one of Mick’s exes), she was the one who actually had a conversation with Sartre and Beauvoir, but what Richards’s remark certainly invites one to do is to thumb through one’s Sartre, perhaps even his little book, Sketch of a Theory of the Emotions from 1939, and pause on a sentence like: ‘But if phenomenology can prove that emotion is in essence a realization of human-reality insofar as it is affection, it will be impossible for it to show that human-reality must necessarily manifest in such emotions’ (Sartre 1948: 94). This formulation – which invokes a distinction between emotion and affect – summarizes a discussion of emotion (in the singular) that defines it in relation to Lewin’s concept of the ‘hodological’ (ibid.: 57). What Sartre finds compelling about this concept – it designates the network of obstructions encountered by consciousness in a given situation – is that it allows one to complement phenomenology with social psychology, it allows one to affirm both the general affective structure of consciousness, and the particular expression of this structure in emotions (in the plural). Lacan, in the opening moves of the ‘Rome Discourse’ will re-word this account of consciousness by appealing to the concept of ‘frustration’.
To conclude, I will generate a few summary remarks of my own. Quite apart from the not uninteresting (litotes being a rhetorical contraction of the double negative) philological and historical question of whether Sartre’s Sketch stands in the wings of ‘Satisfaction’, what Sartre’s discussion reminds us is that a distinction between emotion and affect long pre-dates the one of concern to Leys. Moreover, and this might invite attention from Massumi et al., Sartre’s iteration of this distinction makes no appeal to anti-intentionality. It points, instead, to a different limit, a different ontological border, one that does not situate affect in the somatic, in the autonomic or the pre-rational. In fact, Sartre ascribes affect to a consciousness that for him, as for Husserl, is fundamentally intentional. The question here is not whether Sartre is right, but that his position as staked out in Sketch historicizes the affective turn in a way that complicates Leys’ own strategy of historicization. This does two things: one, it asks us to think differently about the trajectory of the humanities and the social sciences in the preceding century; and, two – the same point worded differently – it asks us to think differently about thought, and thus the problem of whether affect can be thought and whether it can be thought by a song.
In the Shindig! performance of ‘Satisfaction’ the thinking of affect can be traced as it threads between the sound and the image, specifically the images of the drum part. Two shots in particular are worthy of comment. Both are telephoto close-ups of Charlie Watts (Figures 1 and 2). Why do they matter? It has to do with a crystallization of the improbable rebus of which there are three facets: first, there is the ‘nothing-but-repeat’ function of the drum part. The first of these shots occurs during the playing of the refrain.
It establishes the tenacity of the part by anchoring it outside the solos. The second, more telling shot occurs precisely during Watts’s final solo and it is thus enunciated as a moment of individuation in which the agent of a nothing-but-repeat is singled out.
Figure 2 Telephoto close up of the Rolling Stones’ Charlie Watts from a performance of ‘Satisfaction’ on Shindig!
Second, there is the lyrical frame of the solo – the ‘no, no, no’ and ‘hey, hey, hey, hey’ that cue the suspension and resumption of all sound except that of the drums. The solo, the nothing-but-repeat, thus answers to, indeed articulates, the negative interpellation. And third, there is the fact, however contingent, that the entire performance is lip-synched to a track whose provenance has gone missing. It has been re-construed as the Chess version, but it is not. Moreover, Watts’s part assumes an utterly unique status in a lip-synched performance in that, while the guitars can be played without volume (cords and amps may be foregone entirely, or levels may simply be set at zero), the drums cannot be rendered silent. Either one strikes them – however gently (ride cymbals sway, foot pedals move up and down) – or one does not. Scrutiny of the Shindig! tape shows that Watts is indeed playing the high hat, the snare and the kick drum. We see his hands and feet move in time with the pre-recorded tune. In this way he is doubly isolated. That is, he is playing a solo (from Latin solus, alone), and he is ‘live’ in a way that the others are not. This is what makes his expressionless expression important. Even if we take it as the sign of a disdainful virtuosity (Watts being the one ‘serious’ musician in the quintet), it mimes a certain deadness otherwise contradicted by the ‘live’ character of his part. It presents us with an obstruction, a frustration.
But of what sort? If we hear the drum part as a proposition about the drive, about that which does nothing-but-repeat, and hear it as stated against the self-negating arc of the ostinato (it climbs up and down through the same notes and intervals), what emerges is a sonic syllogism in which the dynamism of a certain idleness, or fixity is posited. It is not that one or the other of these propositions asserts the claims of affect. It is the singular tension between them that states the event of affect, of its ‘nihilation’ to invoke a Heideggerianism.
Thus, I am proposing then that we hear this positing, as realized in the radical contingency of the Shindig! performance, as a thinking of affect, but precisely in the mode of a double negative. On the one hand, there is the negation of an ‘I’ who gets satisfaction in the form of its contracted (‘can’t’) obstruction, of an ‘I’ uncovered by what he covers (the ‘sounds of blackness’). On the other, there is something like the negation of negation in which what obstructs satisfaction (the emotion and the song) is an image of thought that cannot recognize itself in the gestural tensions that are the song. In this, of course, I am shifting emphasis to the parens in the song title, the ‘(I Can’t Get No)’ where what advances in the mix is the punctually isolated ‘no, but yes’ that gives us an encounter with affect not as something to be contrasted with emotion, but with affect as the name for what thinking thinks in the mode of its self-obstruction. Not thinking in general, but our thinking. The thinking that can always be about music, but never as music, especially not, as a matter of principle, rock-and-roll music. I don’t know about you but with this – and here I cite a Muddy Waters tune covered on ‘2120’ – ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied.’
Notes
1 Thanks are due to several people who either inspired or commented on these remarks. I am thinking especially of Ebony Adams, Patricia Clough, Sara Saljoughi, Sonnet Retman, Barry Shank and David Shumway. Couldn’t have done it without you.