How Mick Jagger rebelled against the music of “the working class in England”
During a time when everyone and their dog was trying to be in a rock band, The Rolling Stones were one of the fortunate acts to make it to the big leagues, and that wasn’t without a huge amount of persistence.
The band weren’t necessarily blessed with connections to the music industry prior to forming, and while some of the members had slogged things out in less successful acts beforehand, it was based on pure merit that they managed to emerge triumphant and make a gigantic impact on the history of rock and roll.
Frontman Mick Jagger’s early life in Dartford was nothing special and was filled with the same level of suburban drudgery that one might expect to find in all locations outside of major cities, but what he noticed at the time was that music that emerged from these pockets of society was attempting to reflect this way of life.
As far as he was concerned, there was only so much that he could tolerate before this approach to songwriting began to become as boring and uninspired as the surroundings that he grew up in, and the working-class environments needed some excitement injected into them with a style of music that felt like escapism from this dull existence.
During a 1992 interview with Vanity Fair, Jagger reflected upon this facet of his youth and spoke about how boredom with the repetitive nature of bands during this period started to settle in for him. “My great thing against suburban life was that it was, first of all, petty,” he argued, “and secondly, indirect, boring, based on consumer values, at best unambitious, and full of tittle-tattle and jealousies and things like that.”
As unambitious as he claimed it was, he still felt as though there was a remedy to be discovered down the line, and he made it his own personal goal in life to see to providing said fix to the stagnant rock and roll scene that he had grown accustomed to.
“I was trying to look for a music that wasn’t a reflection of that society,” he continued, speaking about how he went about tackling the issue. “But the rock ‘n’ roll that was being played in the working class in England was this sort of teddy-boys thing, incredibly derivative of a music that wasn’t very interesting to start with – of fifties rock.”
He continued by referring to it as an “antiquated, watered-down style,” with the bands he was witnessing being “full of mediocre, boring people.” However, he also acknowledged that the divide between him and his opposition was partially down to his own prejudices, “It was just not right, and so people like me, and people who went to art school and things, thought themselves a cut above that. It was just snobbery, if you want.”
While The Rolling Stones had to fight their way to the top against the tide of uninspired tripe, what the group had managed to achieve by the end of the ‘60s was evidence that it was indeed possible to find a way out of this dreary state, and the shake-up that the band provided not just to rock music in their area, but to the wider world of music, is something that is still felt to this day.
