The Rolling Stones song that Mick Jagger feels was misunderstood
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How Damian Marley taught Mick Jagger to rap
Mick Jagger has made some regrettable decisions throughout his career, and the formation of the supergroup SuperHeavy is right up there with the biggest. However, one good thing did arise from the sorry affair: being taught to rap by Damian Marley.
To put it politely, Jagger’s work outside of The Rolling Stones has been somewhat of a mixed bag. He first began to venture outside of the group in 1985 with his debut outing, She’s The Boss, and since then, he’s released three more albums, with his most recent coming in 2001 with Goddess In The Doorway.
The last time he created an album without Keith Richards beside him came in 2011 with SuperHeavy. They were an eclectic bunch from different walks of life and musical backgrounds, which didn’t blend on paper nor in the studio.
Alongside Jagger were Joss Stone, A.R. Rahman, Dave Stewart and Damian Marley. They tried to blend their different flavours together to make an international cocktail of rock, soul, and reggae with an Indian infusion, but it was too ambitious.
Jagger said of the band at the time of their formation, “We wanted a convergence of different musical styles. We were always overlapping styles, but they were nevertheless separate.”
If anyone has earned the right to make a mistake, it’s Jagger, and their eponymous debut was a ramshackle mess. Although, seemingly, the group had a whale of a time making the album, even if the audiences didn’t share the same feeling when they pressed play on the release.
“For me, it was a great experience to get together and experiment with other musicians,” Marley told Billboard ahead of the release. “I wasn’t familiar with everyone else’s music before the project.”
It wasn’t just Marley who took something from the experience, but Jagger did too, thanks to his Jamaican counterpart. For the first time in his career, The Stones frontman found himself rapping, which was down to Marley Jr’s influence.
“I was just copying Damian,” Jagger told The Hollywood Reporter. “I do a little bit…I went toasting, we call it, but it is the same thing [as Rap]. Damian was doing this really good toasting, West Indian rapping, so I thought, ‘I could do that. It can’t be that difficult.’ It actually was quite difficult. With a bit of practice, it is all right. It is a laugh.”
Watch the footage below from the strange world of SuperHeavy and the video for their track, ‘Miracle Worker’.
