60 Years Ago, the Rolling Stones Were Accused of Racism Over This Classic Song (and It’s Not the One You Think) - VICE

The Rolling Stones have faced accusations of racism a number of times throughout their careers. “Some Girls,” from their 1978 album of the same name, sparked immediate controversy due to a lyric in which Mick Jagger says, “Black girls just wanna get f—ked all night, I just don’t have that much jam.”

Reverend Jesse Jackson denounced the line, calling it a “racial insult” that “degrades blacks and women.” Jagger refused to censor the song, but the record label issued an apology, saying that the track was a “parody of certain stereotypical attitudes,” and that it wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.

In 2021, the band announced that they would no longer play “Brown Sugar” during their concerts. The song, which guitarist Keith Richards described as being about “the horrors of slavery,” hasn’t been performed live since 2019.

“The early days were the days of shock and awe. Things can’t stay like that forever,” Jagger explained in an interview from around that time. He went on to say, “We had our own style and our own way of approaching things, and we had a different way of behaving. And it provoked a lot of people.”

A Misplaced Comma Once Got the Rolling Stones Accused of Racism But as justified as many may think the backlash against those songs was, one of the earliest instances of the Stones coming under fire for something race-related was actually based on complete nonsense. Longtime fans will recall that the U.S. edition of the group’s 1966 album Aftermath contained an unusually titled song labeled “Paint It, Black.”

The inclusion of the comma was apparently an error made by somebody at Decca Records and was not intended by Jagger or any of the band members. However, reissues and digital releases still retain it today.

According to David Dalton’s 1981 book The Rolling Stones: The First Twenty Years, that tiny mistake led to allegations that the song was racist. The implication, if it’s not immediately clear, is that the title is instructing a black person to paint something. “There were some weird letters, racial letters,” Richards told Rolling Stone in 2015. “Was there a comma in the title? Was it an order to the world?” confused fans would write to them.