The 1980s File Feature
Start Me Up
"Start Me Up" — The Rolling Stones Find Their Second WindA Band That Refused to Slow DownBy the summer of 1981, the Rolling Stones had been a going concern f…
01 The Story
"Start Me Up" — The Rolling Stones Find Their Second Wind
A Band That Refused to Slow Down
By the summer of 1981, the Rolling Stones had been a going concern for nearly two decades. Bands of that vintage were supposed to be either broken up, playing county fairs as shadows of their former selves, or putting out diminished records kept alive by brand loyalty rather than actual musical vitality. The Rolling Stones were doing none of those things. Tattoo You, released in August 1981, was a genuine album and Start Me Up, its first single, was a genuine rock song: not a nostalgia product, not a legacy cash-in, but something that could stand on its own in any era.
The story of Start Me Up's creation has become part of rock folklore. The track had apparently existed in various forms in the band's archives for years, originally recorded as a reggae-influenced track during the Some Girls sessions in the late 1970s. Producer Chris Kimsey and the band's engineer worked through the vaults in preparing Tattoo You and found the recording. The reggae version was discarded; the straight rock take that had also been laid down became the song the world knows. Keith Richards' opening guitar riff, two bars of rolling, syncopated energy that announce the song before a single lyric has been delivered, is one of the most immediately recognizable sounds in the entirety of rock and roll.
The Riff That Became a Landmark
There is a particular quality to the best Keith Richards riffs: they sound inevitable, as though the notes were always waiting in that order and someone simply had to find them. The figure that opens Start Me Up achieves this quality definitively. It has been used in commercial advertising (famously in a 1994 Microsoft Windows campaign that reportedly paid the band an extraordinary licensing fee), in sporting event intros, in film soundtracks, and in countless other contexts where three seconds of music need to establish a mood of physical energy and momentum.
Mick Jagger's performance on the record is among his better vocal moments of the decade: controlled but loose, committed but playful. The rhythm section of Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman functions here with the mechanical precision that distinguished their best work together, Watts's drumming in particular achieving the paradox of being simultaneously metronomic and deeply grooved. The song ends up sounding both effortless and extremely well-constructed, which is the definition of great rock and roll.
Twenty-Four Weeks and a Number 2 Peak
Start Me Up entered the Billboard Hot 100 on August 22, 1981, debuting at number 61. The trajectory upward was rapid; within weeks the song was in the top 20, and by late October it had climbed to within one position of the very top of the chart. It peaked at number 2 on October 31, 1981, spending 24 weeks on the Hot 100 — a remarkable endurance figure that speaks to the song's capacity to sustain radio presence across seasons. The record that kept it from number one that week was something that had to work very hard to manage the feat.
The accompanying tour was one of the largest in rock history at the time, a North American stadium run that redefined what a rock and roll touring operation could look like in terms of scale and production value. The song functioned perfectly as a concert opener: that riff, played through a stadium sound system, created an almost physical effect of collective energy.
The Long Tail of a Classic
Decades of continued use across media have given Start Me Up a presence in cultural consciousness that few songs from any era achieve. 83 million YouTube views are perhaps less impressive than they might seem given the song's mainstream ubiquity, but they confirm that even in the YouTube era, people actively seek out the recording rather than merely tolerating it when it appears.
The Rolling Stones recorded many albums after Tattoo You, some of them quite good. But this song occupies a special place in their late-career canon as the moment when the band demonstrated definitively that their best work was not entirely behind them. Put that riff on and feel why it still works.
"Start Me Up" — The Rolling Stones' singular moment on the 1980s charts.
02 Song Meaning
What "Start Me Up" Is Really About
The Engine Metaphor and Its Implications
The lyrics of Start Me Up construct their central conceit around the mechanical: the singer as an engine that requires a specific kind of ignition, and the addressed person as the only one capable of providing it. This framing is less innocent than it might first appear. The mechanical metaphor creates a dynamic in which the narrator is passive, dependent, temporarily inert — and the object of his address holds all the activating power. For a band not typically associated with vulnerability in their romantic material, this is a notably submissive position.
What makes the conceit work is that Jagger's delivery never sounds genuinely helpless. The vulnerability is performed with enough swagger that it functions as a kind of compliment rather than a plea: you are so powerful that I, who am otherwise not easily stopped, cannot move without your involvement. The song flatters its addressee while keeping the narrator in command of the narrative.
Physical Energy as Emotional Content
The song's primary emotional register is physical rather than introspective. The lyrics deal in bodies and movement and activation rather than in feelings articulated as feelings. This is characteristic of the Rolling Stones' approach to romantic material across their career: emotion tends to be expressed through physical action rather than interior monologue. The soul is not examined; it is put in gear.
This approach aligns naturally with the song's sonic character. The Keith Richards riff is itself a form of physical persuasion: it creates a bodily response before the lyrical content has registered. The music and the words are working toward the same end by different routes, both focused on activation, momentum, forward movement.
The Cultural Context of 1981
The early 1980s in American popular music were a moment of significant transition. Disco had collapsed under the weight of its own cultural backlash. New wave and post-punk were establishing themselves as serious artistic movements with genuine commercial potential. The Rolling Stones, arriving with a song this explicitly rooted in classic rock's vocabulary of riffs and grooves and relatively uncomplicated masculine desire, were making an implicit argument that their tradition was not finished, that there was still room for a song that operated without irony on the level of pure physical energy.
The argument was accepted. Start Me Up's two-year journey from the archives to the top of the charts, its 24-week run on the Hot 100, and its decades of continued use suggest that the appetite for this kind of music was not exhausted by the genre upheavals of the preceding years. Sometimes what people want is the riff, the beat, and the voice, in the right configuration, at the right volume.
Why the Song Cannot Be Retired
Very few songs achieve the status of becoming environmental: sounds so woven into the fabric of public life that they function less as discrete musical objects than as cultural constants. Start Me Up has achieved something close to this status. Its use in contexts as varied as sporting events and software launches suggests that the emotional valence of the song has expanded beyond its original lyrical content to encompass something more generalized: a feeling of beginning, of things being set in motion, of latent energy converting to kinetic. The song has become what its title says: a mechanism for starting things up, in whatever context requires it.
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