Please allow him to introduce himself. He’s a man of wealth and taste. The essence of Mick Jagger is all here in his six-minute epic 'Sympathy For The Devil'. His madman bravado. His seductive sneer. His androgynous glimmer. His satanic majesty. The way he cackles, “Mmmmmean it!” That conga beat. That “hoo-hoo” chant. The way he whoops along with Keith’s out-of-nowhere guitar solo. But most of all, the way he keeps daring you to chase him through that funhouse of mirrors he has for a soul, trying to figure him out, trying to hang a name on him, trying to guess the nature of his game. This song sums up why he’s the most elusive and unknowable of rock stars. But it also sums up why he’s the one who’s kept the whole world obsessed for all these years. Pleased to meet you. Hope you guessed his name.
And, as Peter Whitehead revealed in a 1994 interview, the Stones’ front man primed him to expect action at the Royal Albert Hall. “Mick said, ‘I’ll tell you when I’ll get the girls up on stage.’ After a couple of songs, he turned around and said ‘Ready?’ and within 15 seconds the kids were on stage swinging around his neck. He’d toss a couple of girls off and he’d look around as if to say ‘Got enough?’ in the middle of singing this song. It’s demonic, it’s voodoo, it’s Satan.”
So many adjectives have been linked to Jagger: Aristocratic, bitchy, upper class, ladies man, child support, legal bills, court dates, alimony, fame suckers, hangers-on, intellectual property, bitchy, London parasites, starring into the mirror, narcissist, disco's, scenesters, models, groupies, socialites, speed freaks, phonies, poseurs, debauchery, decadent, vanity, mass media, leisure industry complex, prince of darkness, steal your soul, bitchy songs, satanic majesty, androgynous, funhouse of mirrors, urban decay, moral depravity, desolation, economics, high class pimp, fame and fortune, imperialism, combat zones, jaded rouè, showgirl, mystic crystal revelations, acid trip, alienation, apocalypse, violence on the streets, pilage and burning thats its hard to pin him down.
On the song Prodigal Son country-blues sermon from the Rev. Robert Wilkins, transmuted into the strange love between these two blood brothers. It’s the Bible story of the rich man’s heir who goes crawling back home in shame. But Mick has no ability to feel shame, or even surprise — he never had a doubt they’d take him back. At the end, Keith lets out a hearty “heeey!,” as if he’s so caught up in the story — and in this musical mind-meld — he can’t help himself. On Gimme Shelter he said “That’s a kind of end-of-the-world song, really. It’s apocalypse; the whole record’s like that,” Jagger tells Rolling Stone’s Jann S. Wenner. “It’s a very rough, very violent era. The Vietnam War. Violence on the screens. Pillage and burning.” But somehow, the song feels even more terrifying today.
Something Happened to Me Yesterday is a good example of Mick capturing the times. In the heyday of mystic-crystal revelations of 1967, Mick goes deep on an acid trip that leaves him more alienated — and more hilariously English — than ever. David Bowie basically founded his career on this song, especially the moment where Mick muses, “You’re talking in a most peculiar way.” In that moment, you can hear “Space Oddity” and all that followed.
The early days of music video. “Hang Fire” is a zero-budget one-take quickie — no props, no concept, just five rock stars herded into a hallway for a couple of minutes of awesomely inept lip-synching. (Woody maybe had a little too much sugar in his tea this morning.) But Mick minces like a showgirl with the rent due, especially the moment where he sneaks up to a giant picture of himself to give it a great big kiss.
Micks bares his soul in ‘Too Tough’ in 1983, on a startlingly candid song hidden on the Undercover album, where Mick dishes the dirt about how lonely it feels being a jaded roué with a heart of stone. He spots one of his old flames while he’s flipping channels, no doubt in some five-star hotel. As he sings, “I saw you on TV last night in a rerun soap/You were young and beautiful, already without hope.” He wonders why he’s doomed to live his life this way. Then he goes right on living his life this way.
The Stones hit the ground running in the Eighties, with one of their leanest, meanest, funkiest hits. Mick rails against Reagan-era U.S. imperialism, ranting, “One hundred thousand disparus/Lost in the jails of South America.” The band mix the Clash, Grandmaster Flash, Lee Perry, and Duran Duran into their own electro-throb groove. Like so many Stones classics, it’s a boogie through a combat zone. In the video, Keith plays the kidnapper who pulls a gun on Mick — he’d probably spent years waiting for that moment.
Mick’s movie career has led him to some very strange places, but he’s brilliant in the Hollywood melodrama The Man From Elysian Fields’ in 2001, as a high-class pimp running a posh male-escort service. In a fancy restaurant, he confesses to Angelica Huston that fame and fortune is meaningless without true love. “If you don’t use success to enrich your life, then you’re just putting failure into Gucci shoes.” She laughs in his face. Mick never expresses this sentiment ever again.
As a student at the London School of Economics, a nice boy named Mike Jagger changes his name, to conjure up a little faux-Irish salt-of-the-earth street cred. Result: one of the all-time great rock-star names. His family keeps calling him “Mike” for the rest of their lives.
In the star-studded chaos of the Stones’ brilliant concert film Rock and Roll Circus, Mick has a heart-to-heart sitdown with John Lennon. They reminisce about their early days together, calling each other “Michael” and “Winston,” but the tension is electric. “He said a lot of sort of tarty things about the Beatles,” John tells Rolling Stone in 1970, “which I am hurt by, because you know, I can knock the Beatles, but don’t let Mick Jagger knock them. I would like to just list what we did and what the Stones did two months after on every fuckin’ album. Every fuckin’ thing we did, Mick does exactly the same — he imitates us. And I would like one of you fuckin’ underground people to point it out.
Welcome to New York — it’s been waiting for you. Or as Mick would phrase it, “Go ahead, bite the Big Apple! Don’t mind the maggots!” “Shattered” is one of the nastiest, funniest NYC travelogues ever, with Mick bitching about urban decay and moral depravity, from the pimps on Seventh Avenue to the rats on the West Side to the bedbugs uptown. And he wouldn’t be anywhere else. “Shattered” comes at the all-time peak of America’s 1970s obsession with hating New York, in the aftermath of the Summer of Sam, upping the punk-rock ante on CBGB in a riot of “shedooby” chants and guitar sludge. Suggested slogan for the NYC Tourism Bureau: “Pride and joy and greed and sex, that’s what makes our town the best!”
When Jagger & Bowie collaborated on a comedy genius dance-off, two of the proudest rock divas ever face off to strut their stuff, both out for blood. Jagger and Bowie try to top each other, stealing each other’s moves, wiggling their jazz hands and shaking their asses. Funniest moment: While David does his prancing, Mick bends down to grab his beer, takes a swig, then goes back into battle with Bowie. Who wins? We all do
Just when it looked like the Stones were going to fade away into professional rock smarm, Mick saved their bacon with Some Girls, an album of mega-bitchy songs about losing his mind in New York City, in the aftermath of his marriage. It’s their most Mick-dominated album — and their all-time bestseller. In the hit “Miss You,” he faces up to the kind of heartbreak he’s spent his life dancing around, wandering through the city, shuffling barefoot through the street, with total strangers asking, “What’s the matter witchoo, boy?”
Michael Lindsay-Hogg directed Jumping Jack Flash, the revolutionary clip of Mick leading the Stones through their new hit. The Prince of Darkness dances up to the camera, war paint on his face. He does his insolent stare right into your eyes and steals your very soul. His green velvet suit is open in front, with a tattoo of a clock on his chest. He does all the Mick moves you’ve seen so many times, but never scarier than they are right now. Charlie and Bill are done up in mascara. Mick and Brian glower in their shades. It’s the most jolting footage of Mick in action, even though there’s no nudity, no violence, nothing at all but him lost in this song. He’s here to ruin your world. He’s here to warp your mind. He’s up to no good and he absolutely means it.
Nobody’s ever described Mick better than Greil Marcus in his classic Mystery Train: “His songs are loud, brutal and mean, containing feelings you like to pretend you do not have, recollections you would like to forget, and temptations that up until now you have wisely avoided.” That’s all here in “Satisfaction,” where he’s just another product of the leisure-industrial complex, defined by mass media and cigarette ads and sexual consumerism.
Carly Simon definitely chose the right backup singer for her Number One smash “You’re So Vain.” Mick proves why he’s Mr. Love in Vain — because he’s so in love with being vain. You can hear him singing along with Carly in the chorus — “You’re so vain! I bet you think this song is about you! Don’t you? Don’t you? Don’t you?” Mick sings the way you can only sing if you sincerely believe every song is about you.
On the tune Sway the change has come. It’s the Seventies, and Mick is so awash in debauchery he can barely enunciate his words, creating a hypnotic haze with the incantation, “It’s just that demon life has got me in its sway.” The younger, more innocent Mick in the band — new guitar recruit Mick Taylor — plays all the guitar himself, making “Sway” the Stones song that’s officially too decadent for Keith.
Ride On Baby is a lethal satire from Flowers, a concept album about all the hip young scenesters flocking around Mick in the London of 1966: artists, models, groupies, socialites, phonies, speed freaks, poseurs. Mick has nothing but bad news for these people. “Ride On, Baby” kisses them off, with Brian Jones’ harpsichord-and-marimba groove. The music is glam but ominous, as Mick moves in for the kill, sneering, “By the time you’re 30, gonna look 65/You won’t look pretty and your friends will have kissed you goodbye.” How can this song hit so hard yet remain so obscure all these years.
Doncha Bother Me” is the bitchiest moment on the 1966 classic Aftermath — which is quite an achievement. Mick sneers at all the London parasites, hangers-on, imitators, fame-suckers, assuring them that they’ll never catch up to him. Ever the innovator, he also makes sure they can’t lay a finger on his intellectual property
Mick's Studio 54 obsession pays off in “Emotional Rescue,” a comedy goof that somehow flukes its way to the top of the charts. He knocks it off late one night, just for kicks and giggles, ad-libbing an outrageous falsetto-disco vamp on electric piano, with Woody on bass and Charlie on drums. He makes up the arched-eyebrow sex monologue on the spot, promising, “I will be your knight in shining aaarmooour.” To his shock, it blows up into an international dance hit. As he tells Rolling Stone, “It’s just one of those recording-studio things. You would never really write a song like that in real life.
There is practically nothing going on in this tune except Mick staring into a mirror and falling deeply in lust with his own lascivious charms, which is why he can sound so self-parodic yet so authentically lecherous at the same time. (Like so many of his sex songs, it’s all about him, with barely a glance at his alleged muse.) By the end, Mick’s screaming, “I’m the burning bush! I’m the burning fire! I’m the bleeding volcano.
No other rock & roll singer could have gotten away with this teary ballad, but Mick relishes the role of a forlorn aristocrat, weeping over his lost childlike innocence. (Talk about a distant memory.) He and Keith originally wrote it for Marianne Faithful, but it takes Mick’s fab arrogance to put it over the top, as he sobs, “My riches can’t buy everything.
On Some Girls the title song Mick reveals the dirty details of playing the ladies’ man, for any fans out there who wish they could be him. He introduces the kids in the audience to exciting new concepts like child support, social diseases, alimony, court dates, legal bills — and lets them all know they can’t afford.
The deep cut Backstreet Girl feom 1967 is scathing portrait of male vanity — always Mick’s specialty, and always his favorite target for his mean streak. A gorgeous accordion waltz about a hypocritical upper-class snob and his secret working-class mistress, as he talks down to her: “Please take the favors I grant/Curtsy and act nonchalant.
This honky-tonk hoedown groove gets raunchier as it goes along, as Mick tarts it up with his sluttiest schoolgirl gasps over Keith’s guitar. He urges you to rest your weary head on his breasts, and ends up begging you to splash your bodily fluids all over him. In 1969, when the Stones’ music was full of dread and doom, “Let It Bleed” was a moment where the sex drive could win out over the death drive. Even if the song gives you the suspicion that Mick Jagger’s one true erotic obsession will always be Mick Jagger.
On the TAMI SHOW in 1964 he’s got the toughest job in this legendary concert film: He has to go on after James Brown. The Stones begged to play before JB, since nobody in showbiz could top his “Night Train” dance, or his “Please, Please, Please” routine of fighting his way back to the microphone. But Jagger jumps out there and boogies for his life, mincing and swiveling through “It’s All Over Now.”
A soulful guitar ballad about adult heartache. But the money moment is when Mick licks his lips and slips into his falsetto reverie about “pretty-pretty-pretty-pretty girrrrrls.” It’s like he can’t wait for the chance to transform himself into the prettiest girl of them all. (Pretty-pretty! Such a pretty!) It inspired one of the all-time best Stones covers, from the punk band Wild Flag, with the dueling guitars and falsettos of Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and Helium’s Mary Timony.
Mick has brought down the house at 30 Rock so many times: belting “Shattered” in 1978, seeing Jimmy Fallon in the mirror in 2001, karaokeing “Moves Like Jagger” in 2012. But his greatest SNL hit has to be this Weekend Update appearance, with Mike Myers in 1992 playing Mick and Mick all pirated up to play a zonked-out Keith. It’s a Point/Counterpoint debate on controversial rap lyrics, Ice-T, and censorship. Mick-as-Keith just mumbles incomprehensibly, behind his shades, headband, and cigarette. His best punchline: “Mick, you ignorant slut.”
In his comedy special Kid Gorgeous, Mulaney gives a hilarious description of his week of agony when Mick hosted SNL, shooting down his ideas for jokes. “Never to your face does a British billionaire in leather pants go ‘not funnaaaaay!’” When the two write a song together for a sketch, Mulaney has to ask, “Motherfucker, is this how you write songs? Just one word at a time, with verbal abuse?”
Mick wears wizard hat on the cover of ‘Their Satanic Majesties Request'. The Stones tried to go psychedelic in this zany Sgt. Pepper’s omelette, which they quickly disavowed. But Satanic Majesties has always been one of their most underrated records, simply because it’s one of their most Mick records. He absolutely kills it in the dystopian sci-fi blues of “The Lantern,” “Citadel,” and “2000 Man,” a totally accurate prediction of our modern world’s doom-scrolling bait-clicking phone addiction.
The climax of one of the darkest, scariest of all rock films: Performance. Mick stars as a demonic reclusive rock star named Turner, hiding out in his London mansion in a decadent menage a trois with Anita Pallenberg and Michele Breton. As he warns, “The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.” The tension explodes when Mick howls this blues curse, “Memo from Turner,” with blues guitar from Ry Cooder. The song ended up in an equally druggy movie years later — it’s part of Ray Liotta’s coke-sweat freakout at the end of Goodfellas.
Mick is such a symbol of Western decadence, he creates an international crisis without even trying. In August 1983, at the peak of Cold War paranoia, a 16-year-old Russian kid — the son of a Soviet diplomat — tries to defect to the U.S. because he wants to be like the Stones. It doesn’t work, but as he’s boarding the plane back to Moscow, his parting words to reporters: “Say hi to Mick Jagger.”
Mick redefines pants in ‘Rock and Roll Circus’ A fashion peak for Mick, which for him means it’s also a philosophical peak. He’s the ringmaster of the Stones’ lavish concert movie Rock and Roll Circus. Sadly, the film gets buried, because they get cold feet when they see how great the Who are that night. But Mick has never made a prettier peacock, rocking his purple trousers off as he sings “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” In his skintight red shirt and leather belt, he’s the queen of the underground.
Mick redefines the collapse of civilization in ‘Jigsaw Puzzle’. The Stones take a huge leap forward with Beggars Banquet — the album where they finally shake off the Beatles influence and blow up the blues. “Jigsaw Puzzle” is his wildly comic ramble through modern culture, a spoiled rock & roll prince watching the castles crumbling. Mick crows, “The singer, he looks angry at being thrown to the lions!” He also notes that the guitarists look damaged, the drummer looks shattered, and the bassist looks “nervous about the girls outside,” which is probably true.
Mick proves how easy it is to write faux-‘Exile’ songs with ‘Plundered My Soul’ For the 50th Anniversary edition of Exile on Main Street, Mick refurbishes some outtakes into finished songs, whipping up new lyrics. All he needs to do is go into his old Exile character, and out comes the brilliance of “Plundered My Soul.” It kinda raises the question of why he doesn’t do this more often? Jagger pulls the same trick for the Some Girls reissue, adding a whole new coat of NYC grime to “Do You Think I Really Care?”
Angie is exactly the kind of song you’d sing if you wanted to sound heartbroken about a woman, but you had no idea what it was like to give a shit. He sounds like he keeps saying her name because he’s having trouble remembering it. (“Angie, Aaa-haaan-jaaay—it is Angie, right?”) Keith started writing this song while recovering from heroin detox, for the album Goats Head Soup, but Mick turns it into his own kind of melodrama.
'Sweet Thing' is considered to be Mick's best solo effort, but the fantastic deep 'Empty Heart' from 1964, cut from the early days — the hungry young Stones at their meanest, out to conquer the world with this raw, primitive electric screamer of a song. Mick yowls about how it feels to have an empty heart, and why that’s a good thing.
In 1978 Mick caused an internationL scandal, making the headlines for reportedly dallying with Margaret Trudeau — whose husband at the time just happens to be the prime minister of Canada. (As is her son Justin in 2023.) The first lady skips their wedding anniversary to party with the Stones, in the same Toronto hotel where Keith just got busted for dope. Even Charlie Watts admits, “I wouldn’t want my wife associating with us.” Mick is shocked, shocked, at the sex rumors, dismissing them as “insulting to me and insulting to her.”
Monty Python’s Eric Idle and Neil Innes devised the fabbest and funniest of Beatles spoofs: The Rutles. In their TV mock-rockumentary All You Need Is Cash, they chronicle the Pre-Fab Four — “a music legend that will last a lunchtime.” But Mick steals the show as himself, totally deadpan, as he discusses the Rutles’ breakup, warning, “Cherchez la femme.” Mick gets the final word in the movie. Interviewer: “Do you think they’ll ever get back together?” Jagger: “I ‘ope not.”
Mick peacocks across Top 40 radio with the sleepwalk sex swagger of “Honky Tonk Women,” where the poor boy sounds exhausted by his busy bed-hopping schedule. He leers over the guitars and cowbell, as if if he’s slipping into a post-coital coma, chewing up the punchline: “She blew my nose and then she blew my mind.” It hits Number One for four weeks — the Stones’ biggest U.S. single.
Mick is such a symbol of Western decadence, he creates an international crisis without even trying. In August 1983, at the peak of Cold War paranoia, a 16-year-old Russian kid — the son of a Soviet diplomat — tries to defect to the U.S. because he wants to be like the Stones. It doesn’t work, but as he’s boarding the plane back to Moscow, his parting words to reporters: “Say hi to Mick Jagger.”
Mick dances on the 60's grave with 'Dead Flowers' poison valentine for the Woodstock generation? A surly lament for Altamont? A hardass portrait of smiling young potheads turning into zombie-eyed junkies? A countrified obituary for the not-even-dead-yet Gram Parsons? “Dead Flowers” is all that and more.
I’d like to point out one of Mick Jagger’s greatest and most overlooked quirks: his penchant for using ludicrous accents. It’s the oft unmentioned, oft forgotten tool with which Mick pushed music forward, whilst reaching back into its past, shining a mirror to its faults and moving forward.
So, it was quite common for him to don an exaggerated American, more specifically Southern-American accent, while singing various folk or country influenced songs. Quite possibly the best example of this is on the Stone’s 1978 album, “Some Girls,” in which Mick does THE WORST caricature of a country-western singer I have ever heard in “Far Away Eyes.” Mick even does some redneck spoken word “poetry” at various points in the song. It’s immediately funny, but it’s also a subtle satire of the genre, as Mick sings about religion and perfectly parodies the weird, exploitative nature of early rock music and the African American community. As most musicians, such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis built their careers off of stealing from early African American performers.
One of his most explicable, and maybe least intentional accents was that of the strange quasi-German/Austrian accent that he uses in the spoken word section at the end of their 1980 song, “Emotional Rescue.” Nothing is written on this accent. Seriously, I’ve looked multiple times over the years and come up with no reasonable explanation, nor any explanation at all as to why he used that accent. Like, seriously, it’s almost as if nobody’s noticed that the lead singer of one of the world’s biggest rock bands suddenly started musing about being a “knight in shining armor” while LITERALLY sounding like “Funky Dracula.”
Though, he wrote songs for the common folk, quite literally ending an album with a song entitled “Salt of the Earth” in which he literally sang a ballad for the working class. Mick also used, according to a Hazlitt article by Linda Besner, a fake cockney accent, making him sound, more working class than he actually was. According to the article, several famous British people have used this “mockney accent” as a way to fit in with the populace. As Besner writes, “usually doing it to express some kind of solidarity between themselves and a historically underprivileged sector of society,” it was a way for The Stones to inject into the culture their messages, many of which lampooned the status quo and helped to bring about the revolutionary nature of the ‘60s.
In the flesh Jagger looked smaller and less impressive, so he had to work any room he enteted. Which is to say he had to flit around ceaselessly, wave his hands expressively a lot, wiggle his bum a bit, chat with certain people while pointedly ignoring others. He was constantly on the move, his body language like that of an over indulgend eleven year old allowed to stay up late and show off at his parents dinner party. He had this other peculiar habit of adopting the dialect and accent of anyone he was talking to, just as he was talking to them. One one occasion he was in a room with a white guy from the American South, a black guy from LA and a man from the North of England; and everyone stood quietly aghast as Micks voice weaved a reckless path away from his usual Cockney intonations to attempt a 'y'all' drenched drawl straight out of a particularly arch Tennessee Williams productions before slipping into a 'soul brother' black speak somewhat in the over excited cadence of Little Richard. When he finally started talking like a Manchester bus driver, everyone in the room looked utterly mystified because the whole performance was frankly ridiculous to begin with and you couldnt tell if Jagger consciously realized he was even doing it or not. But ultimately it didnt matter cose it got him what he wanted, which was to be the centre of attention.
