(Live in Hamburg, September 13, 1965 ...OMG)
The smartest song EVER written
There is that riff, of course, but the lyrics are in fact a brief summery of the central idea of the aesthetic judgements in Immanuel Kant's Critique Of Judgement.
I once published an essay arguing this much. For those who wonder how such an argument would run, here is a little excerpt of the essay:
Because of the grammatical ambivalence of the ‘can’t get no’, the whole phrase – the song title, that is – is at once a perfect illustration of Kant’s judgement of beauty. Not so much because the delight of beauty must restrain from interest, but because ‘beautiful’ is in fact the name we give to an ‘experience’ which is caused by a dynamic process inside the mind.
It does indeed appear to us that the object is beautiful, but what happens, according to Kant, is that our understanding (Verstand) does not exactly know what is perceived. Our imagination (Einbildungskraft) tries to represent the object in such a way that understanding may find fitting concepts to grasp the object in terms of cognition.
Usually understanding works this way in order to satisfy Reason’s drive for cognition and the desire to make sense of things. However [...] there is no sense in beauty other than being merely delightful. It is therefore not surprising that neither imagination, nor understanding is able to provide satisfactory solutions.
And here the ‘I can’t get no’ kicks in, since both understanding and imagination cannot escape the desire of Reason. The result is, as Kant calls it, a ‘free play’ (freies Spiel) between imagination and understanding. This free play, then, is causing a feeling of delight and of pleasure and, as such, the feeling of satisfaction.
It may be noted that the ‘I can’t get no’ is placed inside brackets, as if to illustrate an internal process – which is exactly Kant's point! – but also that the grammatical ambivalence is apt to the point that the actual practices of understanding and imagination are not resulting in satisfaction for either one of them.
The result of both operations – and therefore placed outside the brackets – is the free play that actually does provide satisfaction for the overarching faculty of Reason.
With Kant’s free play now in mind, the accompanying lyrics of ‘Satisfaction’ are suddenly surprisingly accurate as well. In the first verse there is imagination ‘listening’ (via ‘radio’) to the ‘useless information’ coming from understanding; in the second verse we will find the understanding ‘watching’ confusing images on ‘his’ TV, and then – last but not least – there is the not to be misconstrued ‘cause I try and I try and I try and I try.’
) 