Keith Richards and Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones have announced that they won’t be playing their 70’s hit song “Brown Sugar” on tour anymore.
This news comes after concerns about the 50-year-old song’s reference to the “horrors of slavery” and other controversial topics.
The last time the English rock band performed “Brown Sugar” was at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, Florida in 2019.
When asked about the absence of the song from their set on tour, Richards told the LA Times: “You picked up on that, huh?”
“I don’t know. I’m trying to figure out with the sisters quite where the beef is. Didn’t they understand this was a song about the horrors of slavery?” he said. “But they’re trying to bury it. At the moment I don’t want to get into conflicts with all of this s***.”
The 77-year-old musician concluded that he’s “hoping that we’ll be able to resurrect the babe in her glory somewhere along the track.”
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Jagger, on the other hand, said: “We’ve played ‘Brown Sugar’ every night since 1970, so sometimes you think, We’ll take that one out for now and see how it goes.”
He added: “We might put it back in.”
The first verse of the song says: “Gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields/Sold in the market down in New Orleans /Scarred old slaver knows he’s doing alright/Hear him whip the women just around midnight.”
In a 1995 interview with Rolling Stone, Jagger said he “didn’t think about it at the time. I never would write that song now.”
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“I would probably censor myself. I’d think, ‘Oh God, I can’t. I’ve got to stop. I can’t just write raw like that,’” he said before revealing that he wrote the song in Australia while he was filming Ned Kelly.
“God knows what I’m on about in that song. It’s such a mishmash. All the nasty subjects in one go. [It was a] very instant thing,” he said.
Currently, The Rolling Stones are touring around the US after relaunching their “No Filter Tour” earlier this year.
Tickets for the concerts can be found here.
