The Culture: After 50 years of making music, the Stones keep giving their listeners “satisfaction”

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his year The Rolling Stones celebrate their fiftieth anniversary. I, on the other hand, will ring in my twenty-second birthday.

I’ve only loved the band for about three years, but it’s a strong, devotional sort of love. I can’t even imagine how intense it’d be to have spent a full fifty years adoring them.

The Rolling Stones were formed in 1962; they arrived on that same tidal wave that brought the Beatles to the top of the music scene. Five decades later, their indestructible image looms over the history of rock ’n roll.

Maybe they only made it because they hitched their tugboat to the back of the Beatles’ steamer, but once they got going, they equaled, if not surpassed, their predecessors.

While The Beatles combusted with the sixties, the Rolling Stones exited the hippie era stronger than ever.

That I surround myself with Stones music is a given.

Their classic rock staples and lesser-known treasures are about as essential to my life as breakfast — I can survive without, but who wants to go hungry before lunchtime?

When I was a bratty three-year-old, my mom used to sing me “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

After that, it took me a while to warm up to the song, and by extension, the band. They reminded me of those few unpleasant moments when I couldn’t bully my parents into saying yes.

Then, the summer before I started college, I heard “Under My Thumb” and couldn’t listen to music the same way again.

Falling for The Rolling Stones is like dropping a bomb in your brain. And I mean this in the best possible way: it’s transcendentally destructive.

Now I have 185 of their songs in my iTunes library. They are without a doubt my favorite band.

Besides their impressive catalogue, I’m fascinated with the Stones’ lives and legends: the clothes, the women, the decadence. Their world is full of grotesque beauty.

To understand what I mean, take a look at a photograph of Mick Jagger circa 1970.

Stories of the band in the sixties and seventies are a bit like Greek mythology. Events seem epic, fated and yet utterly absurd. Feuding brothers driven apart by beautiful and devious women. Love affairs that make or break empires. It’s heady stuff.

I’m enthralled by the Stones because they represent something radically different from my own clean little life.

They are wild and gritty; they are sex, drugs and rock ’n roll.

When I allow myself to indulge in delusions of grandeur, I listen to “You Got the Silver” and imagine I am a Stones muse. I become that untamed sixties chick with long blonde hair and bright bohemian clothes.

I must be a model, because really, who are we kidding?

But I have an internal spark that makes my eyes flash “like airplane lights.” It’s a strange kind of power, that of a woman who can pull such a sweet melody from Keith Richards’ guitar strings.

It’s curious that Stones music makes me so happy when the songs themselves are not particularly uplifting. (Except, perhaps, for that one off Exile on Main St. explicitly titled “Happy.”)

Instead, Jagger’s lyrics are usually full of discontent.

You can listen to him whine and howl, “I can’t get no satisfaction” on their most iconic song of the same name. Or even better, hear him yell, “Hey! You! Get off of my cloud!” on the follow-up to that monstrous hit.

Otherwise the words are despondent and longing or glib and crude, sometimes both.

Take, for example, “Beast of Burden.” Jagger sings, “You can put me out on the street, put me out with no shoes on my feet, but put me out, put me out, put me out of misery.” On the surface, the message is sexual, but the tone is nevertheless striking in its vulnerability.

Note the mix of careless anger and desperate pleading.

It’s the Stones’ combination of devil-may-care attitude and raw emotion that has me compelled.

For some reason, this is exactly the kind of music I want to listen to when I’m down. The lyrics to “Beast of Burden” comfort me and tell me, “All your sickness, I can suck it up. Throw it all at me, I can shrug it off.” And I do.

But at the core, the Stones are simply thrilling.

There’s nothing quite like hearing the opening chords of “Brown Sugar” or the screams that signal the start of “Sympathy for the Devil.”

At these moments, when the beat ignites something in your lungs or in the pit of your stomach, you know why their music will never die.

Along with words and melody, the Stones understand that rock ’n roll is image.

In their performances, the audio and visual intertwine. Jagger can certainly entertain your ears, but lend him your eyes as well and he’ll flash at them like a mirror, making psychedelic art.

In the 60s, their stage presence was viewed as vulgar and threatening.

They were dirty and strange-looking, their message iconoclastic and offensive.

If you watch an old black-and-white clip of twenty-one-year-old Mick Jagger glaring luridly into the camera, you can imagine how his gaze made suburban parents shiver. His huge lips are singing some dirty song, and his eyes are saying, “I’ll own your world.”

Now, fifty years later, The Rolling Stones are gods: still vulgar and a little scary, but always the best.