By Armond White

Martin Scorsese’s jukebox is the cornerstone of his thinking. Pop music, more so than his well-known love of cinema, provides his personal philosophical reference point. Starting with the use of “Rubber Biscuit” in 1969’s Who’s That Knocking on My Door and The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” in 1973’s Mean Streets, Scorsese’s music enthusiasms reveal his deepest feelings about America: crime, race-relations and—his arm’s-length topic—romantic love. Yet it’s only now, in Shine A Light, Scorsese’s new Rolling Stones concert movie, that he confesses the source of his thinking. In Shine A Light, Scorsese unmistakably confronts hegemony.

Shine A Light commemorates a benefit concert for The Bill Clinton Foundation at New York’s Beacon Theater held in 2006. Early scenes show Clinton introducing the distracted, fame-fatigued rockers to his friends, family (even to the president of Poland)—proof that The Stones’ licentiousness and moral duplicity are well suited to Clintonesque ideology. Clinton’s sanctioning of The Stones also illustrates how the group’s notoriety has been absorbed into baby-boomer privilege. If there’s anything unique about Shine A Light, it’s the coincidental display of Scorsese’s thrall with social power and cultural authority. The Stones aren’t assaulting the barricades of good taste anymore: They hold court. And pop-lover Scorsese records the event as evidence that boomer taste still rules.

When Scorsese used the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” to underscore The Departed’s first scenes (doc footage of race riots in 1970s Boston), such musical commentary depoliticized the historical events. Neither viscerally nor kinetically apt, that gimmick didn’t reflect the story’s Boston Irish mob culture; instead, it was an egocentric expression of Scorsese’s own rockist subjectivity. Relating those riots to the killing of a black man at the Stones’ infamous 1969 Altamont concert was an extreme example of semiotics, melding image and music to create self-conscious, idiosyncratic text.

“Gimme Shelter” in The Departed inadvertently disclosed Scorsese’s isolation from those events. The Stones’ music was the only way for a pop fan of Scorsese’s generation and class to imaginatively throw himself back into that period. Pop music represents a particular perspective, and the Stones’ aura of counterculture hipness seemed quasi-authentic. It passed for unchallenged authority and that’s what Shine A Light celebrates (using the title song’s pseudo-gospel as an end-credits benedictory).

Scorsese aims for more than a concert movie. Slyer than Todd Haynes’ ripping off Don’t Look Back to evoke Bob Dylan, the opening black-and-white backstage footage echoes Robert Frank’s 1974 Stones doc Cocksucker Blues. Scorsese evokes an art-historical approach to the Stones. Although once billed as the world’s greatest rock-and-roll band, they haven’t had a top-ten hit record since 1981’s “Start Me Up.” Still, in recent years they’ve been a top-draw live-concert ticket. But that’s not the phenomenon that attracted Scorsese; Shine A Light pays homage to a totem of 1960s counterculture more than it documents an event. This automatic assumption of the Stones’ primacy is an expression of hegemony every bit as much as Scorsese’s 1978 musical/concert movie The Last Waltz which valorized The Band.

This concert begins with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (the song that ignited Robert De Niro’s bar entrance in Mean Streets), strangely played at warp speed. The Stones’ past-mastery and Mick Jagger’s freaked-out calisthenics are proof of veterans going through the motions. There’s nothing to prove, and there’s not even an audience of consumers to win-over. The front rows are not packed with devoted fans but privileged ticket-holders—fashion models deliberately planted to decorate the stage’s runway. Scorsese arranged this celebrity-worshipping spectacle as a paean to rock majesty; but, praise the god of cinema, reality undercuts it.

Look closely: During the Stones’ performance of “Some Girls,” that boastful whine about female greed and desire, Jagger gripes, “American girls want everything in the world you can possibly imagine!” and the concert audience cheers. Jagger’s 1978 complaint is now heard as a compliment. Apparently these new, yuppie Stones fans belong to the post-Madonna age; they’re Material Girls. It’s a fascinating case of rock music losing its original meanings and, through time, being traduced by listeners’ selfish inference (no doubt it’s a crowd weaned on GoodFellas and Casino). Scorsese’s older-generation attitude toward the Stones has been supplanted by contemporary narcissism. It may be a fitting response to the Stones’ own decadence, but it fucks up Scorsese’s intended hero worship, exposing how even the Stones are subject to the whims of fashion.

Yet it’s in the nature of hegemonic performance that Scorsese and the Stones go forth as if nothing has changed since rock’s first British Invasion. The only sign of the new is Christina Aguilera’s caterwauling rendition of “Live With Me” and Jack White’s pitiful sing-a-long on “Loving Cup.” The Stones’ tumultuous vamping on the original “Loving Cup” may be the most ecstatic blackface routine in the history of Western pop: Here, Jack White can’t keep up. That the Stones tolerate his weak-ass effort (he’s obviously star-struck) exposes the disingenuousness of rock’s usual cultural politics—the charade of blue-eyed soul.

When the Stones were new—and great—they changed the way people thought about black and white cultural synergy; this—and the band’s irresistible rhythms—obviously made Scorsese’s peers feel culturally invincible. Scorsese’s movies haven’t moved beyond that sense of rock arousal. (Even his admirable PBS series The Blues curiously avoided the excitement of soul music, rhythm-and-blues and rap.) It was thrilling when Scorsese injected Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore with a jolt of Mott the Hoople; but lately, his rockist sensibility has seemed out of date in movies like Bringing Out the Dead and The Departed. The only filmmaker whose work matches the Stones’quest for Black American cultural authenticity is Quentin Tarantino, whose eccentric musical taste is, ironically, a White Negro compliment to Wes Anderson’s indie-nerd sensibility. In Shine A Light, Scorsese celebrates the Stones’ past glories and obliviousness to the present. Lined, weathered and mask-like, they’re totems of the past and of unreconstructed white cultural dominance. Jagger unearths “As Tears Go By” (an “old, old song,” he says) which is the evening’s only admission of age. But the performance is strained; its lack of poignancy seems almost resentful.

Flashback montages of 1960s interviews bring up the old Stones controversy of Anarchy vs. Individual Freedom (including a shot of the group in drag, predating The New York Dolls). It’s the closest Scorsese gets to sociology. (He told the Howard Hughes story in The Aviator with zero interest in historicism—emphasizing the undistinguished Hell’s Angels as if it were a pivotal moment in movie culture.) Movies occupy a limited, fan-like, apolitical space in his intelligence, but pop music unavoidably connects Scorsese to the real world through the intrinsic way music intersects with politics. And Shine A Light shows how he has withdrawn from social realism.

The concert is a hollow spectacle; it’s a celebration of fame, not music as artistic expression. The calamitous version of “Shattered” loses its original New York feeling. No longer harrowing, it’s now a nursery rhyme for the Clinton/Bloomberg gentry. The model girls get lost in euphoria, mindlessly chanting along with Jagger: “Don’t you know the crime rate’s goin’ up, up, up, up, UP!"

Only when Buddy Guy steps onstage for a duet of Muddy Waters’ “Champagne and Reefer” does music and film art come together. All night the Stones had difficulty finding a groove, playing each famous song in the wrong tempo, but Buddy Guy sets them straight. Finally, Scorsese’s cinematic instincts wake up. His close up of Guy is magisterial: handsome and beautiful and strong, a visual epiphany to match Bob Dylan materializing in a white fedora during the climax of The Last Waltz. Guy, a veteran black blues musician with a strong potent yowl, brings the Stones their most vital moment. This is black and white communion—tense, envious, unequal as it always is in Scorsese’s movies. The ambivalence the Stones have lived with these past four decades has gone unspoken until a humbled Keith Richards says “It’s yours!” surrendering his own guitar to Buddy Guy.

Until that scene, both the Stones and Scorsese have lacked inspiration. The Stones’ catalog becomes another part of his unapologetic white-ethnic toughness. The most scabrous lyric of “Some Girls” is expunged, along with “Under My Thumb.” And “Brown Sugar” still dances “like a black girl should.” (That groundbreaking song’s paean to black female sexuality shows where Mean Streets’ protagonist’s troubles began.) Technically, though, Shine A Light is superb. Robert Richardson’s mobile camera makes you feel you’re on stage with the band—even closer than U23D—and the sound quality is stunning: loud, clear, lustrous. Yet, the best Rolling Stones concert movie remains Hal Ashby’s 1983 film Let’s Spend the Night Together. It had glorious 70mm imagery by Caleb Deschanel and an ingenious “Honky Tonk Women” performance that turned the Stones’ chauvinism into an egalitarian extravaganza. In Shine A Light, Scorsese accepts the Stones’ sexism, racism, et al. Unlike Ashby, he doesn’t revise them, nor can he revive them.