“Brown Sugar,” the opening track from the Rolling Stones’ 1971 masterpiece Sticky Fingers, is one of the band’s biggest hits. It reached #1 on Billboard‘s Hot 100 and has been a mainstay of their setlists for more than 50 years, since even before the studio version was released. It is also a messy and problematic song in which white men fetishize sex with Black women using lots of allusions to slavery. In his column The Number Ones, my colleague Tom Breihan summed up the thorniness of “Brown Sugar” like so: