Exalted indifference. Innocent malice. Careless cruelty. It is these ambiguous mixtures of emotion which we find in songs like "Play with Fire," "Back Street Girl" and "Star Star"—a mixture revealing the disturbing yet fascinating quality of a child grown up too soon, like a six-year-old dragging on a cigarette. And it was this "child" who dangerously explored the ever-lurking but disapproved world of sex and drugs in songs like "Under My Thumb," "Sister Morphine" and "Monkey Man."

Yet when the Stones were at their most exploitative, they seemed their most liberating, because we became aware of the reversal of that social and psychological pathology by which the oppressed identify with their oppressors: We sensed that the Stones, from their position of indifferent power, were singing the voice of the hurt and abused, thereby magically transcending all humiliation barriers ("But it's all right now / In fact it's a...