Billboard has revisited its own archive coverage of the Rolling Stones to mark the band's six-decade career, timed to the release of their new album Foreign Tongues. The retrospective traces the magazine's reporting from the band's 1964 US debut single "Not Fade Away" through to the present, offering a candid, often self-deprecating look at how Billboard's assessments of the band shifted, and occasionally erred, over the years.

The piece pulls choice excerpts from past issues: a 1964 ad boasting the Stones would "crush The Beatles", a lukewarm 1969 tour review criticising Mick Jagger's "trite" theatrics, and a mistaken 1971 report crediting Keith Richards with the lead vocal on "Wild Horses". It also notes Billboard's 1978 prediction that a major tour would be the band's last (an early instance of a now 45-year running joke), coverage of the sponsorship-driven 1989 Steel Wheels tour, and reflections from Richards on drummer Charlie Watts, who died in 2021 aged 80, and the band's enduring bond. Across 62 years, the Stones have released 25 albums and cycled through three guitarists.