Let's start out with an understanding. The Rolling Stones are dumb guys. They were (and remain) meathead posers who tried and failed to rival the Beatles, then merely existed several decades longer than the Beatles because they are scheming opportunists freely feeding off corporate milk until they breathe their last gurgled breaths, and thus of course they continue to be motivated to keep the band lurching along lest any disruption break their latch.
And so of course they wrote a song with lyrics as dumb as this song's. It was also the early '70s, they were on lots of drugs, and they were at the absolute peak of their fame, riding an unmitigated God complex. That arrogance would soon come to a dark climax with their tragic Altamont performance, which was ironically where they debuted "Brown Sugar." It's funny how, when people pretend to have all this macho, anti-establishment bluster, to the point where they invite Hell's Angels to be their bodyguards, the true animals inevitably take over and bring a hell that all the lightweight big talkers can only gape at. We continue today to talk big from our lightweight pulpits, normalizing the impulse to invite the heavyweight demons into our midst whilst they size up our jugulars.
I honestly think the lyrics of "Brown Sugar" have good intentions to be self-critical of racial/sexual power and privilege, if incredibly clumsily so.
The verses seem to progress through generations, from the original slavers to the institutional slave drivers to the privileged white men of Jagger's time, including himself.
It was a very explosive time of racial tension, with the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in the very recent past, and with Richard "Law and Order (dog whistle)" Nixon running the U.S. The English rockers tended to wade into this subject at their peril, out of their depth as they were on many, many levels. Paul McCartney wrote "Black Bird," which is a cute song but a little innocent in a mildly offensive way. Mick Jagger decided to apply the meathead philosophy of the Rolling Stones and write this gasper.
I'm not here to forgive him or denounce him.
The song is such a great composition. I'm clearly not a Rolling Stones fan, but I still have to acknowledge they bumbled into one. If you give the lyrics the benefit of the doubt, the most offensive thing is the rawness of the subject, but I don't shy away from stuff like that.
With "Bohemian Rhapsody," I steered away from close reading the lyrics because they are so ambiguous as to leave me speculating, and Freddie Mercury's life was just so not my experience I didn't feel enough authority. I'm not gonna sit around trying to straightsplain when there is such pure musical abundance to lavish with praise. The lyrics of "Brown Sugar" call so much more attention to themselves that my disclaimer has taken up 95% of my writing here.
And yet still I list this song.
Because I don't shy away.
And it is such a great composition.