Reflecting on The Rolling Stones: ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ and ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’

Famous songs lose their context and impact when you grow up with them. You enjoy a great rhythm and learn to sing along without hearing the words. And sometimes when you do hear them, you hear the wrong parts too loud.

I was vibing with the lyric ‘What a drag it is getting old’ this morning and it made me dig out ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ and listen to it again:

‘Mother’s Little Helper’ official lyric video on YouTube

I know this song well and have long thought it was an interesting critique of the misogynistic culture 1950s and 60s housewives endured; worn out, unappreciated, and bored, relying on early prescription anti-depressants that were addictive and harmful. Not the take you expect from a bunch of young men living the life of rock stars.

Most are in a hurry to point out that the Stones are underlining the hypocrisy of middle class family values critiquing drugs in youth culture, but there are a lot of barbed lines specifically aimed at the misogyny and showing a lot of empathy for the women themselves:

“Men just aren’t the same today”
I hear every mother say
“They just don’t appreciate that you get tired”
They’re so hard to satisfy
You can tranquilize your mind…

And four help you through the night
Help to minimize your plight…

The song describes a woman or women heading for a complete breakdown and being offered drugs instead of help. The men don’t appreciate how much they do ‘that you get tired’, the experience of women is recognised as a ‘plight’ that’s being minimised.

The jaunty, off-kilter riff makes this sound like an upbeat song despite the minor key – it distracts from the fact that this song is actually quite empathetic and alarming (much like the tranquilisers alluded to as ‘mothers little helpers’.

All of this, I was pretty familiar with. What changed listening to it today was that rather than considering it a historical artefact – grounded in the situation of a housewife, a very alien concept to me – I related to it.

It’s not just that I myself am getting older, and seeing the big Four-Oh approaching. It’s that the anti-depressants I rely on to function are not masking the horrors of the life I am struggling to live in.

Anti-depressants have come a long way. I have unironically described the Duloxetine I’m currently on as a ‘Wonder Drug’. It does powerful good at controlling my anxiety without making me feel sedated. Depression and anxiety are the things that are altering my mind. the SNRI I take restores balance. Or attempts to.

And unlike what the song says, this is a genuine illness. I have an imbalance in my chemicals (amplified by trauma) that needs correcting.

But there’s no denying it, the situation I’m in is fucked. I do not think I would need the drugs I’m taking if I wasn’t frequently required to keep working through intollerable things.

For the mid-century housewife, misogyny and rigid gender division of labour, which devalued women’s labour, was the biggest cause. For me, an ableist, capitalistic hellscape fraught with growing fascism and transphobia is front and centre. But the two things aren’t that different. Both are rooted in binary gender essentialism and capitalist economic tyranny.

These are real problems. A real plight for which no one is offering tangible, practical help. So I need to take medication, because the heightened level of anxiety about real problems on top of my existing trauma, has just gone on too long.

The drugs in this case aren’t bad, but they’re not the long-term solution I need. In a more just society, I wouldn’t need them.

Which brings me to my second Rolling Stones song, which YouTube helpfully pointed me at after I listened to the other:

‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’.

This lyric hit a little harder, and rang a little truer than it had in previous listenings:

And I went down to the demonstration
To get my fair share of abuse
Singing, we’re gonna vent our frustration
If we don’t, we’re going to blow a 50-amp fuse

I am so full of frustration – the ableism and transphobia are so overwhelming right now. Hell YES I feel like I’m gonna blow a 50-amp fuse.

Only there’s nothing like the demonstrations of the 50s and 60s, and I’d be too sick to go to them if they were any.

I want to RIOT but I can’t.

I also realised that over the last few years I’ve been misreading this lyric.:

You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime
You just might find
You get what you need

I thought it was putting ‘you’ down for wanting things (‘I want doesn’t get’) and what you ‘need’ might be a slap in the face. The sort of thing a parent tells you to get you to shut up. I was not a fan of that.

But listening to the rest of the lyrics – especially the protest verse… It’s not saying to *stop* asking for what you want. It’s saying you have to keep trying to get what you want. You have to ask over and over, even if it means not getting what you want over and over. Because if you don’t ask, you never get what you need.

Sometimes you don’t get everything you ask for, but you still get something.

We have to get better at standing up and asking. And we have to keep standing up for each other. Because it’s hard to keep speaking up and getting your ‘fair share of abuse’.

It gave me another view of the protests I’ve been too. Especially the last one (against Trump’s visit to the UK). It was depressingly small. A police officer made me censor my sign to be more polite under threat of arrest. A fascist infiltrated our tiny protest and the other protesters had to use their signs to cover his. I ended up getting too tired and had to go home early.

It was not exactly an uplifting experience.

But like Mick says, when it’s important, protests aren’t great, validating experiences. They’re running up against a dominant culture that SUCKS. You’ll get abused for going, and most of the time you won’t get what you want out of it. But you have to keep showing up.

You have to keep showing up and asking for what you want, or you’re never gonna get what you need.

So thanks, Mick. Things are pretty shit right now, and the utter apathy of the vast majority of people about the issues that are absolutely essential to me… it’s gutting. And I can’t afford to keep pushing myself if I’m the only one doing it. But I guess what I get from this is that even when it feels like you’re just volunteering to get beaten up over and over again, continuing to show up matters. Even if it’s just writing on a blog post or a committee that never seems to achieve change.

Sometimes you achieve change. Sometimes you’re an inert object that stops bad change from happening. Sometimes you’re just an irritant that slows the tank of capitalism down as it rolls over you.

You can’t always get what you want. But sometimes, you get just enough of what you need for it to matter.

We get more of what we need when we show up together.

I’m going to continue showing up in the shitty situations where I don’t get what I want and mostly don’t get what I need. But if you show up with me we’ll get what we need a little bit more often.

It’s time to watch films from the 1930s

Klara Novak persuades Mr Matuschek to give her a job. (The Shop Around the Corner.)

This might seem like an odd statement, but it’s never been more true. I’ve been thinking it a lot for the last few years (as those who have read my review of Mr Smith Goes to Washington will know) but a post I read recently on Tumblr galvanised me to write-up the interlinked thoughts on this matter that have been batting around my head.

The post was by Robert Reich, and is called ‘Why there’s no Outcry‘. It’s concerned with a matter that’s been close to my heart, lately: the fact that we know the gap between the rich and the poor is widening at an alarming rate, but we are not responding as we have done in the past, with such things as ‘the Progressive Era or the New Deal or the Great Society‘. The answer, Reich posits, is that groups who have previously engaged in the activism that prompted such reforms are too inhibited by their financial and political restraints to demand the change that is necessary. Reich focuses in particular on the working poor, who are too afraid of losing their jobs, and for most of whom unions no longer have the political clout to seem like a viable ally; and on students, who in the past have had the political freedom, intellectual stimulation, and lack of immediate financial pressure, to allow them to participate in activism in a way working people rarely have the luxury and resources to. The working poor are not unionised, students are hemmed in by debt and fear of being unable to obtain a job with which to pay it off. And all people have had their liberty to protest restricted as our civil liberties are eroded.

Technology also plays into this. Whilst the Internet gives us new avenues to communicate, spread knowledge, voice anger, governments and big business also use it, and increasing surveillance, to monitor us. Speaking up becomes a significant risk. Chillingly, protesters in the Ukraine were recently texted by their government: ‘Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance’. And right now the Ukrainian government is preparing to shut down all access to internet, TV, and telephone to cut off communications with the rest of the world to prevent news of the protests spreading. Meanwhile, Net Neutrality is under threat in the US, and the US government plans another war whilst the victims of Hurricane Katrina still languish in poverty, 8 years on. And, as is noted in that link (attributed to Bryan Pfeifer, but I couldn’t locate the original) most of the ignored victims are people of colour – our social divisions deepen along financial lines as rich white people fail to be interested in plights that largely affect people of colour. It’s hard to ignore the comparison to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, immortalised in the song ‘When the Levee Breaks’, in which ‘somewhere between 700,000 and 1 million people were displaced’, mostly black people, many of whom were held in concentration camps when they tried to seek refuge elsewhere.

But whilst the similarities to events of the 1920s and 30s abound, our popular media is full of eccentric billionaires and superheroes who right our wrongs in fantastic style, wowing us with showy fights and special effects which offer us nothing that we can turn to in ourselves to fight our struggles with. I love Person of Interest and its evident concern with  surveillance culture, but the answer is not a white billionaire genius computer nerd teaming up with a white super-spy. I’m the first to enjoy a good fantasy, and I love superhero films, but we’re drowning in sedative culture that ignores the pressing concerns of our day to day lives and seeks to make us forget to take our own stands.

As a Jimmy Stewart fan, I sought out a number of his old films simply to watch the great and beautiful man do his thing. What I got was a punch to the gut of people living the experiences we’re feeling right now nearly a century ago. When you mention It’s a Wonderful Life, people think of a feel-good Christmas movie. When you talk about Mr Smith Goes to Washington, you think of a political drama about an Everyman figure fighting the good fight. If you’ve heard of it, then you might think of The Shop Around the Corner as a sappy romance, in a similar vein to its later incarnation You’ve Got Mail. But there are important differences between You’ve Got Mail and The Shop Around the Corner, and these differences chiefly arise because You’ve Got Mail was made in the boom years, where the social pressures of The Shop Around the Corner simply do not apply. Meg Ryan plays a shop owner who is put out of business by the owner of a big chain, but she’s never really in dire financial straights, and neither is he. The stakes are pretty low on both sides. For a film whose premise is to take an old film and try to show that despite changes in technology, things are still pretty much the same, it kind of strikingly misses the point of the original film.

Check it: The Shop Around the Corner starts as Klara Novak (Margaret Sullavan), having been forced to leave a job where she was being sexually harassed, is desperately seeking work at another department store. She approaches Alfred Kralik (Jimmy Stewart), the senior clerk at Matuschek and Company. He’s clearly at the top of his game and a good deal brighter than the store owner, and he tries to let Klara down gently, pointing out that Matuschek & Co. aren’t doing such great business themselves. But Klara gets a lucky break when Mr Matuschek overhears their conversation and is impressed when Klara manages to sell a box that he had disagreed with Kralik over earlier. Klara is hired, but she and Kralik have got off on the wrong foot.

It turns out that Kralik has been engaged in romantic correspondence with a woman he has never met. They arrange to meet, but on the day of their date, Kralik is fired, due to a misunderstanding, and the fact that he’s the only person in the place prepared to stand up to Mr Matuschek. Kralik can’t face keeping his date, but his friend persuades him to go see what the girl looks like anyway. I hope it’s no spoiler to say that it turns out to be Klara. The rest of the plot unfolds as you might expect, with some interesting side plots.

You can already see how economic uncertainty (including how this can be affected by issues like gender) is at the heart of the plot. These are people who are in employment, but still living very much on the edge. Klara is truly brave to leave her former employment after she’s sexually harassed, but doing so leaves her in desperate straights. Both Klara and Kralik are intelligent and self-educated – their meeting of minds is over literature, and Kralik had found Klara’s ad in the classifieds when looking for second hand encyclopedias –  both clearly capable of performing roles much more challenging than those they are employed to perform, and both extremely grateful to be employed at all. Kralik’s bravery in speaking out is noted as rash on several occasions. Kralik’s friend, Pirovitch (Felix Bressart) advises him, gently:

Pirovitch: Kralik, don’t be impulsive, not at a time like this. Not when millions of people are out of work.
Kralik: I can get a job anywhere.
Pirovitch: Can you? Let’s be honest.
Kralik: I’ll take a chance. I’m no coward, you know. I’m not afraid.
Pirovitch: I am. I have a family.
Kralik: Well, I haven’t.
Pirovitch: Think it over. Those were nice letters, weren’t they?

Pirovitch is pointing out that even love has a cost. To speak out is to endanger not only your own health and happiness, but that of those around you. If you lose your job, you can’t support a family, you can’t plan a family, and you become a prospective burden to anyone who might become involved with you. In times of economic hardship, the wise person avoids risks. Maybe money can’t buy you love, but love can certainly leave where the lack of money makes loving too hard.

And it’s no empty warning: we see that Kralik’s intelligence and outspokenness puts him in the firing line when the boss is looking for someone to blame, even though Kralik has been nothing but loyal. He does lose his job, and his boss loses a good worker. But he can afford to do so – there are other good workers who will step up to the plate to fill his place. Of course, this is a romantic comedy, it’s required to have a happy ending, so things work out OK, but every conversation is underwritten with a tension that says that everyone except for Mr Matuschek is living on the edge. And even though Mr Matuschek is basically an OK sort of guy, the extent by which his wealth exceeds those of his workers is striking.

Sure, this is a film about love, but it’s also a film about economics, unfairness, the poverty line, and how this interacts with one’s ability to protest and live a free and independent life.

By the same measure, Mr Smith Goes to Washington isn’t just an underdog film, it’s a film about political corruption, the power of the state and big business to destroy anyone who dares to protest; it’s about media control and the control of education and the right of children of all races to have freedom to learn in a positive environment, and how rich white men will not only take that away without thinking, they will fight viciously, and they will win if we do not have laws in place to prevent it and a populace knowledgeable, willing, and brave enough to make use of those laws.

Similarly, It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t just a tale about how an angel gets his wings by helping a good man see how the world is a better place with him in it. It shows how reckless and selfish bankers can ruin hundreds of lives and leave unfortunate ordinary people to take the consequences in their place. It’s a film about hardship and desperation before the happy ending, and how good people can be driven to take their own lives by economic hardship. And it’s a film about how we need to stand together in difficult times against the rich and privileged who would throw us under a bus.

I don’t know how we get out of this state we have allowed this world to get into, but what I do know is that we have faced these issues before and found a way out the other side. So maybe it would do us some good to watch the films we made the last time around.