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Rolling Stones songs: Citadel
Screaming people fly so fast/ In their shiny metal cars…
Parallel Visions: The Rolling Stones’ Citadel and Bob Dylan’s Shadow
Before Bob Dylan recorded All Along the Watchtower in October 1967, Mick Jagger had already written the lyrics to Citadel a month earlier, a coincidence that feels less accidental than intuitive. Both songs seem to tune into the same unsettled frequency, capturing a moment when uncertainty, threat, and spiritual unease saturated the cultural air. Jagger’s words unfold like fragments from a troubled dream, populated by guards, distant journeys, and enforced belief, suggesting a society ruled by suspicion rather than trust. Dylan, working independently, would soon explore similar terrain through parable and myth.
The striking overlap hints at two writers responding instinctively to the same pressures: war abroad, authority questioned at home, and a generation searching for meaning in collapsing structures. Rather than imitation, what emerges is parallel imagination—artists standing in different rooms, yet hearing the same distant alarm echoing through the late 1960s, amplified by the era’s psychedelic intensity and urban chaos.
Two songs, one uneasy moment
While Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower leans heavily into biblical cadence and mythic distance, Citadelfeels more immediate and enclosed, powered by what may be one of the Rolling Stones’ strongest overtly psychedelic statements. Dylan’s characters speak as if standing outside history, watching events repeat themselves in endless cycles. Jagger’s narrator, by contrast, seems trapped inside the system he describes, propelled forward by a relentless rhythmic drive. The song’s foundation is a fierce guitar riff from Keith Richards, rock-solid and insistent, suggesting that the music itself came first and the vision followed. That rhythmic fury anchors the track even as the arrangement flirts with psychedelic excess. Authority inCitadelis not abstract; it is armed, vocal, and omnipresent. Belief is not reflective but demanded. Together, these qualities give the song a physical urgency that mirrors the instability of its time.
Concrete dreams and dollar flags
From its opening imageryCitadel constructs a city that feels both fantastical and uncomfortably familiar. Skyscrapers become “concrete hills”, money transforms into flags, and the urban landscape takes on the role of an authoritarian monument. This is not simply a setting but a character—looming, mechanical, and indifferent. Wealth dominates the skyline, suggesting a society where value has replaced values, and the chaos of city life is pushed to hallucinatory extremes. Acid magnifies the frenzy, turning everyday motion into a disorienting rush. The city breathes, but without warmth. There is an almost cinematic quality to this vision, as if Jagger were sketching scenes rather than verses. The result is a metropolis that dazzles and suffocates at the same time. The song stands firmly on its rhythmic base, allowing the imagery to spiral outward without collapsing into abstraction.
From Metropolis to The Factory
The atmosphere of Citadelresonates strongly with earlier visions of dystopia. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis hovers in the background, with its stark divisions between power and labor, humanity and machinery. Jagger’s city shares that cold precision, a place where individuals are reduced to figures moving through vast structures they did not design. At the same time, the song absorbs elements of pop art and the underground scene. Lyrically, it has been read as a loose continuation of Ruby Tuesday, introducing figures like Candy and Taffy—characters often interpreted as groupies drifting through this psychedelic cityscape. Candy’s presence also links back to Warhol’s Factory, a glittering citadel of artifice and desire. These overlapping references blur fantasy and reality, turning Citadel into a composite myth shaped by film, fame, and urban excess rather than a single, fixed narrative.
A psychedelic warning, not an escape
It would be easy to dismiss Citadel as a product of psychedelic indulgence, but that reading overlooks its discipline and force. Beneath the swirling textures lies a song driven by one of Richards’ most compelling riffs, giving it a muscular clarity that allows it to endure as a lost classic. Even where the arrangement spills into excess, the core remains intact, balancing experimentation with the Stones’ trademark rhythmic authority. The song doesn’t offer escape; it issues a warning. Its surreal imagery heightens reality rather than dissolving it, presenting modern life as frenetic, monetized, and emotionally dislocating. That strength may explain why echoes of the Stones’ psychedelic era later surfaced elsewhere—most notably in debates around Roxy Music’s Street Life and its famously familiar riff. Decades on Citadel still feels update-ready, a track that could easily be revived, its fortress of sound and meaning as relevant as ever.
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