Dante’s Beach, Ravenna

I was on my way to buy a bougainvillea from the plant shop with my middle son, Giovanni Maria, 14. We were in the Land Rover Defender, windows down with ‘Satisfaction’ by the Rolling Stones on the stereo at very high ‘hey, hey, hey!’ volume. Each time the chorus arrived – ‘I can’t get no!/ Hey, hey, hey!/ That’s what I say!’ – we rapped our knuckles on the dashboard in time to the gunshot drumbeat of Charlie Watts. We drove past the parched fields by the sea that looked like they would catch fire if someone so much as uttered a word out of place.

The Stones are one of my very few favourite bands although I don’t listen to anything they’ve done since 1974, as it lacks the raw beauty of their first decade. But I’ve got most of what they did before then on CD in the Defender, if need be. And it was ‘Satisfaction’ that got me hooked on them when I first heard it as a teenager, half a century ago when I was Giovanni Maria’s age, at a burger joint on the King’s Road with my mother.

She had gone to Bangor University in 1967 with Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull and the Beatles to meditate with the Maharishi under blankets. So she was pretty ‘with it’, as they used to say, though I had to pretend that I did not know her when she once asked me very loudly from the other side of the record department in Harrods: ‘Nicky, who’s Chuck Berry?’

But the question that occurred to me while Giovanni Maria and I drove noisily on towards our destination was this: if it is verboten for the white man to wear a Mexican sombrero at a fancy dress party, or a Sioux chief’s feather headdress, on the grounds that it is cultural appropriation, then why has it been OK all these years for the Stones to appropriate – i.e. steal – the music of black America?

For that is what they did. Hook, line and sinker. The greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world stole the blues from Muddy Waters, the rock from Chuck Berry and the roll from Bo Diddley. Jagger’s singing voice is the voice of a black man from the cotton states of the Deep South. The only difference between the prancing jongleur and a black and white minstrel is that he does not black up his face. As Keith Richards once said: ‘No Muddy, no Stones.’

When we got home, I asked AI: ‘Why have the Rolling Stones not been cancelled for stealing black music?’ It replied in its typical tiptoe way: ‘The Rolling Stones have avoided being “cancelled” for playing blues and R&B because they historically credited original Black artists, championed them during segregation, and cultural norms viewed their work as homage rather than theft.’

That coy term ‘cultural norms’ – so dishonestly deployed by AI to avoid pointing the finger at actual human beings – presumably means those in charge of the cult called woke, formerly known as political correctness. Yet if I, a swarthy white man burnt brown by the Mediterranean sun, wear a sombrero to a party then that is theft from, rather than homage to, Mexico. Or so I understand it.

What about my black ‘Comandante Che Guevara’ beret that I wear around town in winter? Should I desist on the grounds that I am stealing Cuba? As an Englishman, is the only hat I am allowed to wear a bowler? In Italy?

So is what the Stones have done homage or theft? The answer, I suppose, is both. But there’s another issue here. In 1957, Norman Mailer, sacred monster of the radical chic left, wrote a much-discussed essay called ‘The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster’, in which he said that white men were afflicted by ‘psychic havoc’ as a result of the Holocaust and the atom bomb. He said that the only cure was for the white man to become the sexually fantastic black man on the edge of society who lived for the present and the pleasures of the body, who loved jazz and ‘the good orgasm’ and who was not afraid to be violent. ‘Put down your whiteness,’ he wrote, and adopt ‘the cool lifestyle of Negro hipsters’.

As an Englishman, is the only hat I am allowed to wear a bowler? In Italy?

I myself tried this in the all-night subterranean shebeens of Hackney, near the Balls Pond Road where I lived in those days – a lone white male high as a kite on skunk, dancing until dawn to the down and dirty bass beat of roots reggae so powerful it vibrated the walls. It did not get me very far. But I was only mugged once. ‘Come on, man, hurry up and hand it over, I do this for a living,’ said the black man in a surprisingly gentle manner.

I was not the white negro. Merely the white wanker. But Jagger was its epitome.

Here is le point. Where once the left urged white people to become ‘white negroes’, nowadays it cancels them if they try. Tellingly, in 2022 Mailer’s publisher Random House, reportedly refused to publish a collection of his essays to mark the centenary of his birth after staff complained about the white negro one. The left has travelled, in my lifetime, from white negro to woke nazi.