Satisfaction

I can't get no

I am normally resistant to writing about this kind of overexposed Boomer anthem, but it occurred to me that it would be an interesting tune to analyze on the first day of pop aural skills class, because it’s both simple and harmonically interesting.

For background on the song and on the Stones generally, I recommend this episode of Andrew Hickey’s brilliant 500 Songs podcast. Andrew describes “Satisfaction” as “a record that took the social protest of the folk-rock movement, aligned it with the misogyny its singer had found in many blues songs, and turned it into the most powerful expression of male adolescent frustration ever recorded to that point.” He also neatly puts his fingers on the thing that bothers me most about the song, and about the Stones’ whole vibe:

[W]hen Bo Diddley sang “I’m a Man”, the subtext was “so don’t call me ‘boy’, cracker”. Meanwhile, when some British white teenagers from Essex sang the same words, in complete ignorance of the world in which Diddley lived, what they were singing was “I’m a man now, mummy, so you can’t make me tidy my room if I don’t want to”.

But the thing is, there are a lot of teenagers out there who don’t want to tidy their rooms, and that kind of message does resonate.

According to Secondhand Songs, “Satisfaction” is the ninth most covered song of 1965. My favorite of those covers is the one performed by PJ Harvey and Björk at the 1994 Brit Awards.

This recording is the real reason I wanted to talk about the song in class. The Stones’ tempo is about 135 beats per minute, but PJ and Björk take it at more like 90. One student described it as sounding like an impending murder. The feeling of menace is compounded by the odd meter and the incongruously quiet power chords.