Rolling Stones' 'Brown Sugar': How a 1971 Hit Became a Setlist Casualty in 2021

The most interesting thing about “Brown Sugar” is that it took the Rolling Stones 50 years to admit the song was problematic in the way everyone else had been saying for decades. The lyrics explicitly reference slavery, rape, and the sexual exploitation of Black women— lines like “Gold Coast slave ship bound for cotton fields” and “Hear him whip the women just around midnight” are delivered over a swaggering riff that made the song an instant number-one hit in 1971. Jagger later claimed he was writing about the “horrors of slavery” and using the slave trade as a metaphor for sexual obsession, but the song’s narrator clearly enjoys the power dynamic.

No official music video was released in 1971, but the song’s live performances— often with backup dancers and exaggerated stage antics— kept the imagery alive. Criticism grew louder through the 1990s and 2000s, and by 2019 Jagger told the Wall Street Journal the band was “trying to write more about liberation” and that “Brown Sugar” was “a bit clumsy.” In 2021, during their North American tour, the Stones dropped it from the setlist entirely, citing the discomfort of playing a song that “makes people feel uncomfortable” about race and history. They replaced it with a cover of “Stray Cat Blues” for similar reasons. The band hasn’t retired it permanently, but the move signaled a rare moment of self-awareness from