Iconic rock band The Rolling Stones recently announced they've decided to retire one of their biggest hits, "Brown Sugar," because of its racist implications--and British media personality Piers Morgan is absolutely furious about it.
The Stones said this week that they would be removing the song from its set list for the remainder of its current U.S. tour due to lyrics that reference, and some say glorify, the horrors of slavery.
But Morgan chalked the whole thing up to the band "surrender[ing] to the woke brigade" in an irate op-ed for The Daily Mail demanding to know why rap music is allowed to exist if "Brown Sugar" has to be retired, or something.
See his tweet about the op-ed below.
In his piece, Morgan claims the song's lyrics, which discuss slave ships and the beating and rape of Black female slaves from the point of view of a lascivious slave owner, are meant to show the horrors of slavery, not to glorify it.
Morgan wrote:
"Whatever the truth, 'Brown Sugar' is demonstrably a song aimed at defending and supporting black women, not one that seeks to denigrate them or make light of slavery."
This echoes comments made this week by Stones guitarist Keith Richards, co-writer of the song, who wondered aloud why people don't "understand this was a song about the horrors of slavery." But the song's critics counter that any anti-slavery message is obscured by the song's overt sexualization of Black women and their brutalization under slavery.
Morgan dismisses that notion as merely a "woke-fueled narrative" bent on painting the Stones as racists, and has branded the entire controversy ridiculous on the basis that rap music exists.
"In an era when rap lyrics are riddled with not just hardcore sexual content but also vile misogyny, sexism, homophobia, rape fantasies and violence including entreaties to kill the police, such concern over something so relatively tame seems laughable."
The distinction, of course, is that there's no real comparison between rap, a primarily Black art form made primarily by Black people about the Black experience, and a song about the brutalization of Black people made by a group of white men from a white point of view.
Morgan then decried the lack of "woke campaigns" against offensive rap lyrics and songs like Robin Thicke's notoriously rape-adjacent "Blurred Lines," seemingly unaware of the fact that those conversations have been ongoing for years and in some cases decades.
On Twitter, Morgan's complaints left many people unimpressed.
Regardless of the intent of "Brown Sugar," even Mick Jagger himself expressed discomfort over its lyrics more that 25 years ago, saying he would "never would write that song now" in a 1995 interview with Rolling Stone.
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