Honky Tonk Women

A cowbell announces it before anything else, and that lone percussion strike sets the entire tone — laconic, bar-room, fundamentally unserious about itself. Then a country-blues guitar figure slinks in and the whole thing lurches forward with the confidence of a man who's already three drinks deep and has no regrets. The arrangement is deceptively simple: guitar, bass, drums, piano, and occasional horns that drift in like smoke. Jagger performs with a looseness bordering on detachment, recounting tales of women in Memphis and New York with equal appreciation, his British vowels colliding cheerfully with the American idiom. There's a honky-tonk authenticity here that the Stones somehow managed despite being from Dartford — partly because the rawness of their technique obscured any phoniness. This is music for jukeboxes, for late afternoons in places that smell like beer and sawdust, for anyone who's ever preferred a wry shrug to a grand statement.