Blurry lines

The plasticity of meaning that Justice Antonin Scalia has identified as shaping the Supreme Court’s 6-3 King v. Burwell decision is nothing new.

But it wasn’t until the 1960s—when Andy Warhol began uttering pseudo-aphorisms such as “It’s not what you are that counts, it’s what they think you are” and “Art is what you can get away with”—that ontological malleability actually became fashionable.

Warhol figures in the background of two recent Universal Music 45th-anniversary “super deluxe” reissues: Sticky Fingers by The Rolling Stones and The Velvet Underground by The Velvet Underground, a band that Warhol himself discovered.

The Velvet Underground’s cover photo shows Doug Yule, Maureen Tucker, Lou Reed, and Sterling Morrison reclining on a couch in Warhol’s “Factory” studio. The cover of Sticky Fingers, which Warhol himself conceived and the execution of which he oversaw, comprises an immodest below-the-belt image of a jeans-clad male. Flagrantly naughty, it has, perhaps unsurprisingly, become as iconic in Warhol’s oeuvre as his silk-screened soup cans.

But Warhol’s influence runs deeper. As with his own work, both Sticky Fingers’ and The Velvet Underground’s most captivating passages are animated by the tension between the genuine and the counterfeit and by the extent to which the line separating them can be blurred into a simulacrum of art.

This common characteristic emerges despite the albums’ obvious differences. Sticky Fingers testifies to the Stones’ roots in American blues while The Velvet Underground resounds within the parameters of what would eventually become known as punk’s “art rock” periphery. And, ancillary though it is, there’s the matter of their reception: Sticky Fingers topped the charts in nine countries; The Velvet Underground failed to chart anywhere. (It eventually reached 197 in the United States when it was reissued in 1985.)

Nowadays, both albums are viewed as pop-cultural high-water marks. But the reasons are, at least in part, extra-musical. Sticky Fingers, for instance, took on heightened significance as the first Rolling Stones album to appear after the 1969 deaths of Brian Jones (the one-time head Stone) and Meredith Hunter (the concertgoer killed by a Hell’s Angel while the Stones played “Under My Thumb” at the Altamont Festival).

In this context, the failure of the new recordings to evince anything like contrition for having sown the wind and reaped a whirlwind was striking. Songs such as “Brown Sugar,” “Bitch,” and “Sister Morphine” created sympathy if not for the devil then at least for the Stones’ Faustian public personae. The traditional gospel number “You Gotta Move,” which might have proven a spiritual tonic, felt more like a joke, so parodic was Mick Jagger’s attempt to sound authentically black.

Similarly ambiguous was Track Five on The Velvet Underground, “Jesus.” Was it the simple, devout prayer that it seemed to be or merely Lou Reed’s way, as a non-religious Jew, of spoofing sentimental Christian clichés?

As the first VU album without the band’s co-founder John Cale, The Velvet Underground found Reed steering the group in a singer-songwriterly direction at odds with its dark, experimental image. Not counting “The Murder Mystery” (in which Reed and Morrison recite unrelated nonsense verse simultaneously for nine minutes), the songs were often surprisingly lyrical.

Telling whether they were sincere or not, however, remained difficult, so consistently did Reed—who to his dying day expressed admiration for Warhol—undercut straightforward declarations with facetious asides or whimsical music.

“I love plastic,” Warhol once said. “I want to be plastic.” Sticky Fingers, The Velvet Underground, and now a majority of the Supreme Court prove that he wasn’t alone.