I agree with Keef

I’d like it if the band took an audience poll.
Brown Sugar—Yes?
Brown Sugar—No?
If Yes, they play it.
If the No response is louder, Mick says Screw It, we’re playing it anyway.
That’s The Rolling Stones I remember.

millercarbon

... We are talking about a song the mob has pressured and coerced them into dropping simply because they can ...

No, I didn't see any evidence of a mob. I think Mick just decided to drop the song for his own reasons. He surely doesn't need the money. But the issue makes a good narrative for the battle-hardened soldiers in the front line of the culture wars.

"I’m trying to figure out with the sisters quite where the beef is," Richards said. "Didn’t they understand this was a song about the horrors of slavery? But they’re trying to bury it. At the moment I don’t want to get into conflicts with all of this."

The song has faced renewed criticism amid heightened cultural awareness and sensitivity in light of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements.

In 2019, music producer Ian Brennan accused the band of "glorifying slavery, rape, torture and pedophilia," adding that they have "brazenly gotten away with this jeering harassment for decades." He called for the songs to be removed from the radio.

"The issue today is not that they ever wrote the song. Nor that they have ever sung it. The fault is that they keep singing it," Brennan wrote in The Chicago Tribune.

Quotes directly from the article, if you actually bothered to read it. 

No, I didn't see any evidence of a mob. I think Mick just decided to drop the song for his own reasons.

So no, Mick didn't drop it for his own reasons. Good grief.

@millercarbon,

"If you want to live in a world where you are no longer free to do or even think anything but what they tell you, just keep going the way you are. If you want to live free, JUST SAY NO!"

+1

Besides, this is Rock and Roll we’re discussing here.

You don’t like it, don’t listen to it.

Don’t try to stop others either.

(Maybe also try to get help with parental/authority issues, but that’s a separate personal issue).

It’s called freedom of choice.

History has shown us time and time again that such freedoms are hard won and often all too easily surrendered.