Emptiness in an Age of Plenty and Why We “Can’t Get No Satisfaction”

Successful music, like film or art, often taps into underlying cultural tensions. Psychoanalytic art criticism suggests that a song will become popular because it reflects an ongoing cultural developmental crisis. Popular songs channel unconscious desires and fears in mass audience and by pleasing listeners the songwriter expresses the cultural mythology of the era.

The Rolling Stones anthem “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” released in 1965 is considered by many to be the second most popular and influential song of the 20^th century (Rolling Stones Magazine, 2004). The question is why? Certainly the reason for its vast popularity was not solely due to the repetitive and somewhat sinister guitar riff by Keith Richards which opens the song. One reason “Satisfaction” rose to the top of cultural consciousness is because the Mick Jagger lyrics tapped directly into an emerging social experience that needed immediate and repeated expression. The song acted as a cultural safety valve that let out enormous steam.

When I’m drivin’ in my car
And a man comes on the radio
He’s telling me more and more
About some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination

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I can’t get no, oh no no no
(From song “Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones [1965])

The song is about both the emerging hedonism of the early 60s and a growing awareness that hedonism in any form leaves one disappointed. Jagger was no uneducated fool. He attended the prestigious London School of Economics and was undoubtedly exposed to marketing theory. He was able to not only latch onto and capitalize on the growing power of the sexual revolution but more importantly he articulated the growing problem with a consumeristic society where we are incessantly bombarded with publicity and advertising images which effectively tell us what we do not have and what we need in order to achieve some “satisfaction.”

Jagger was not the first artist to address to the issue of cultural emptiness, despair, and consumerism. The three time Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Albee wrote the play The American Dream (1961) which opens with a chilling dialogue between Mommy and Daddy about how dissatisfied Mommy is with the purchase of her new beige colored hat. I suggest that underlying dynamic sensed by both Albee and Jagger was a growing sense of hollowness in the culture.

In 1973 John Berger wrote the “Way We See” and described his concern about the effect that the flood of publicity images were beginning to have on viewers. He felt that constantly being told what one does not have breeds hunger and despair. This anthem of emptiness, hunger, despair, and lack of satisfaction were the themes expressed by both Jagger and Albee and contribute to why the song “Satisfaction” could be seen as the anthem of the 20^th Century.

The book end song to the album “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” a song that is often ranked as the most influential song of the 20^th Century, is “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan. It achieved its status because it channeled the cultural crisis that we had entered. Dylan verbalized the celebrity side of the publicity image game. On one side we the people desperately hunger for satisfaction, esteem, and happiness; on the other side are the beautiful celebrities and famous artists like Dylan who are the unwitting recipients of all this glory, adulation, and envy. Dylan has described the

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receiving of applause and adulation as a revolting and nauseating experience, commenting that “Here are all these people continuously praising me and for what? I’m basically just a guy singing some songs. You know they can kill you with kindness.”

Now it’s 2015 and we are a population mesmerized by publicity images and covetous of the goods we see advertised each hour of the day. Marketing companies are so sophisticated that they make the guys in the television series Mad Men (2007-) look like children. Companies now regularly hire “cool hunters,” young hipsters who are paid to observe the coolest trends as they unfold and then report back to the company which then manufactures, labels, and sells it all back to us. Everyone is sold to and everyone buys in. It is not too much to say that we have all become hypnotized zombies hungry for some kind, any kind, and every kind of satisfaction.

On the other side of the wall are the glamourous ones we see in ads, films, or television. But lest you let your envy get the best of you, my guess is they are no better off. Look at the long line of dead celebrities in a wide range of fields. In literature we have David Foster Wallace, Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jack Kerouac. In music we have Michael Jackson, Jimmy Hendrix, Brian Jones, and Kurt Cobain. In film we have Marilyn Monroe, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Heath Ledger. All overdosed on fame, love, and envy.

The primary cultural crisis in early 21^st century America is aptly revealed in its two most popular songs. As the electronic revolution bumbles into the future we are along for the ride. In “The Illusion of the End,” Jean Baudrillard, a theorist of postmodernism, told us that all these beautiful images, songs, goods, and services are actually too much to bear. They are coming at us too fast to handle. They have us by the throat. They are irresistible. That’s the way it is. It is an impossible state. All this perfection at our hands, our feet, and in our mouths. All this emptiness and dissatisfaction at the very same time. It seems as if “I can’t get no satisfaction, I can’t get no satisfaction. Cause I try and I try and I try and I try, I can’t get no, I can’t get no.”

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