There sometimes comes a story that you think, when you first read it, is a parody or satire. Nobody in their right mind would think this way, you conclude. But in our PC era you are likely to be wrong.

I can vaguely remember the first time I heard this song. It was probably tooling around Hollywood, FL, drunk with my friends, sometime in the mid-70s, just around midnight. One of us slipped the Stones cassette in the player and we howled and barked in rough approximation of Mick Jagger. Then we took another drink, or hit, and listened to more Stones. But, as we’ve noted before, that was fun and PC censors can’t tolerate fun of any sort.

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Thus they somehow have convinced Mick and the elderly boys to drop the tune “Brown Sugar” from their repertoire. The lyrics, which I probably read off an album cover, always seemed pretty anti-slavery. So we’re not sure just what the PC crowd is objecting to. Keith Richards seems to wonder about that too.

FNC: “The Rolling Stones retired one of their most popular rock songs due to lyrics that depict the horrors of slavery. The Stones have not played the 1971 hit ‘Brown Sugar’ on their current tour and said the blues classic has been removed from their setlist.

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‘You picked up on that, huh?,’ Keith Richards, 77, responded to the LA Times when asked if the Stones had cut the second-most-performed tune in their catalog amid a climate of heightened cultural sensitivity.”

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“I don’t know. 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. We’ve played ‘Brown Sugar’ every night since 1970,” said Richards. He probably means 1870. He was around then, right?

“So sometimes you think, ‘We’ll take that one out for now and see how it goes.’ We might put it back in…At the moment I don’t want to get into conflicts with all of this s–t,” Richards said. “But I’m hoping that we’ll be able to resurrect the babe in her glory somewhere along the track.” Let’s hope so. Wouldn’t be the Stones without it.