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Name: Keno
E-Mail: keno@fairpoint.net
Subject: Tattoo You and Undercover
Date: Thursday, December 20, 2018
Time: 3:59:46 AM
Remote Address: 97.107.69.29
Message ID: 319171
Parent ID: 0
Thread ID: 319171
So this afternoon (I’m still on Wednesday, but I guess that’s yesterday for most of you), in my quest to re-rate all of the Stones albums one last time (and for the third time in 20 plus years), it was time to get to Tattoo You and Undercover, the next 2 up in line. Both rose is their ratings from the last time I rated them in ’05, but neither rose enough to go up any in the overall album rating standings, either.
TY is now at 7.14 (up from 6.92 in ’05). I still think this 1980 release, which was really mainly an album of outtakes of rejected or forgotten and unfinished tracks from the 1970s (with 2 or 3 exceptions), is still overrated by fans. While there’s a few very good ones on here, most of them aren’t really good at all and are just fair at best.
The first 2 songs on here that kick off the album, “Start Me Up” and “Hang Fire”, rose the most out of the 11 songs on the album, with SMU finally making it to the Stones “10 rated club for songs”. It’s last rating was a 9.5, just missing a top rating, but in part, and unlike at least a couple of my fellow Gassers here, I love the fact that some of the NFL teams play this song to start off their games - and it just might have been that fact as to why it’s a 10 now for me. Just think, the Stones get free advertising out this on the TV and at the stadiums every time it plays at, while it cost the teams nothing money wise to use the song, a win-win for all! Plus for the Stones, it brings in new fans to them while old fans like me get to see the light on just how great this song really is.
“Hang Fire” also rose 1.1 points with its new rating, even if to this day I still hear them singing “Hang 5”! I guess if you live in the UK you know what “hang fire” means and that’s what you do hear, but here in the states it isn’t a term used too much and so for most it really means nothing – unless you are a surfer maybe – and you too are hearing them sing “hang 5”, but most of us don’t surf and never hang 5 (or even hang 10 for that matter).
As far as the other songs go, most saw almost the same ratings from the last time around, with just slight changes that make no difference for the most part. Yet as been the case for me, most of the other tracks are on the poor side and sound very boring - with me wishing those song would just end already. I don’t usually feel that way when listening to a Stones LP, but this overrated album does that to me every time I hear it, other than for 3 or 4 cuts on here…. “Waiting on a Friend” is still the best song on the album and every time I hear it I just can’t understand how it took 8 years for them to release this masterpiece of a song – or how they forgot about it for that many years while it just sat in the vaults gathering dust.
For Undercover, its new rating went up a bit too, from 6.60 to 6.69 and still sits in 21st place out of the 25 spots in the album standings. I realize that isn’t the case with most Stones fans - as for its reviews by fans it’s tied with ER for the second to last place spot, and sits all alone in the fans overall ratings in second to last place. In our album VS album polls, it also sits in second to last place with just one win.
On this one, yet another song finally gets to the 10 rated Club, that being the title cut – well okay - technically there is no true title cut on this LP since the kick off song has a different and longer title than the LP, that being “Undercover of the Night”. But I think most of us look at it as the title cut anyway. This tune went up even more than SMU on TY did, rising from an 8.8 to a 10.0. But heck, the song that goes with my all-time favorite Stones video deserved a top rating, if only for it’s cool video. Yet just hearing it on its own sounds like a 10 to me these days, too, even if that wasn’t the case in the past. Heck, back in 1998 when I first reviewed the LP, it only scored an 8.2!
All of the rest of the songs didn’t change too much, other than “Feel on Baby” fell way below the domain’s Mendozer line, down to only a 4.9! I believe not counting one or 2 of Keith’s terrible crooner songs, this one might be the only Jagger sang song to get a lower than 5 rating (unless DW got one on it?... I haven’t checked). Sorry, but this song is about as forgettable as any Stones song goes. Frankly, it flat out sucks! Let me change that to: it totally sucks!
But overall, I actually enjoyed playing Undercover again, and it’s one of maybe 4 Stones studio albums that I never play at all. But for me, the 1980s were a wasteland as far as the Stones studio albums went, with 4 of their 5 lowest all time rated albums (by me) released in the '80s, and guess what – they only released 4 studio albums in the '80s!
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