Rocks Off

The album opener of Exile on Main St. announces itself with a rhythmic intensity that barely lets you find your footing — drums already rolling, guitar already cutting, horns already blaring before you've oriented. It's the sound of waking up in a place you don't quite recognize but aren't afraid of. Jagger sings with a hoarseness that suggests genuine wear, and the lyric is impressionistic — sensation over narrative, bodies and music and heat. The production is famously murky, everything bleeding into everything else, recorded in the basement of a Côte d'Azur villa on equipment that was barely adequate. That murkiness became the album's signature texture and this track exemplifies it: not messy through carelessness but through an aesthetic decision to let the music breathe and sweat and stick together. It opens a double album that many consider the band's masterpiece, and as a threshold it works perfectly — disorienting, seductive, slightly dangerous.