"Martin Scorsese’s jukebox is the cornerstone of his thinking. Pop
music, more so than his well-known love of cinema, provides his
personal philosophical reference point. Starting with the use of
“Rubber Biscuit” in 1969’s Who’s That Knocking on My Door and The
Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” in 1973’s Mean Streets, Scorsese’s music
enthusiasms reveal his deepest feelings about America: crime,
race-relations and—his arm’s-length topic—romantic love. Yet it’s only
now, in Shine A Light, Scorsese’s new Rolling Stones concert movie,
that he confesses the source of his thinking. In Shine A Light,
Scorsese unmistakably confronts hegemony.
Shine A Light commemorates a benefit concert for The Bill Clinton
Foundation at New York’s Beacon Theater held in 2006. Early scenes show
Clinton introducing the distracted, fame-fatigued rockers to his
friends, family (even to the president of Poland)—proof that The
Stones’ licentiousness and moral duplicity are well suited to
Clintonesque ideology. Clinton’s sanctioning of The Stones also
illustrates how the group’s notoriety has been absorbed into
baby-boomer privilege. If there’s anything unique about Shine A Light,
it’s the coincidental display of Scorsese’s thrall with social power
and cultural authority. The Stones aren’t assaulting the barricades of
good taste anymore: They hold court. And pop-lover Scorsese records the
event as evidence that boomer taste still rules.
When Scorsese used the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” to underscore The
Departed’s first scenes (doc footage of race riots in 1970s Boston),
such musical commentary depoliticized the historical events. Neither
viscerally nor kinetically apt, that gimmick didn’t reflect the story’s
Boston Irish mob culture; instead, it was an egocentric expression of
Scorsese’s own rockist subjectivity. Relating those riots to the
killing of a black man at the Stones’ infamous 1969 Altamont concert
was an extreme example of semiotics, melding image and music to create
self-conscious, idiosyncratic text.
“Gimme Shelter” in The Departed inadvertently disclosed Scorsese’s
isolation from those events. The Stones’ music was the only way for a
pop fan of Scorsese’s generation and class to imaginatively throw
himself back into that period. Pop music represents a particular
perspective, and the Stones’ aura of counterculture hipness seemed
quasi-authentic. It passed for unchallenged authority and that’s what
Shine A Light celebrates (using the title song’s pseudo-gospel as an
end-credits benedictory).
Calcified and Commodified
Martin Scorsese's new concert documentary wants to solidify the Rolling Stones in rock history, but Armand White says that all he really shows is how hollow their celebrity has become. From the New York Press.
