Why Mick Jagger thought rock and roll was dead: “That’s all gone”
Nothing is ever going to kill rock and roll. The genre might not be as popular as it used to be, but for every hour that goes by with rock music absent from the charts, there’s a kid in his bedroom slowly chipping away at writing songs before he hits on something that will take over the world. But for an individual like Mick Jagger, he was convinced that political movements were the reason why rock couldn’t be taken seriously anymore.
When The Rolling Stones first got the ball rolling, music didn’t have to concern itself with the greater problems. They were playing the blues, and some of the greatest bluesmen in the world didn’t have to worry about anything other than ‘the man’ putting them down or a woman who did them wrong.
At the same time, were artists just supposed to ignore the fact that the Vietnam War was going on? Throughout the genre’s golden age, the world was still undergoing one of the most traumatic wars anyone had ever seen, along with staging political rallies revolving around the political discourse surrounding innocent people being killed.
Like many things in rock and roll, The Beatles got to the political doctrine before The Stones could, with Lennon firing the first real shot on ‘Revolution’. Two could play at that game, and when The Stones heard about the rioting happening on the streets from various student protestors, ‘Street Fighting Man’ became one of the biggest anthems of their career.
Writing a song like that doesn’t come from someone who doesn’t care, but Jagger saw the whole thing as a bit blown out of proportion in retrospect, recalling in Classic Rock Stories, “Basically, rock and roll isn’t protest, and never was. It’s not political. It promotes interfamilial tension. Now, it can’t even do that because fathers don’t get outraged with the music. So rock and roll’s gone, that’s all gone.”
While there are elements of truth to rock and roll being dead in that respect, that doesn’t mean the final lid in the coffin has been hammered in. Rock isn’t dead; it’s just in a state of change at the moment.
Even though the aesthetic of using music to rally around a sentiment you believe in, there will always be fans looking to put their own spin on it. If anything, rock has been getting overlapped by hip-hop artists in that respect for decades, with the biggest artists in the world being Kendrick Lamar and Drake as of late.
As for Jagger and The Stones, they have been more than happy to just play to their strengths half the time. Just ponder a moment when you heard a Rolling Stones song that sounded fresh, and you’ll probably have to go back multiple decades before you find something that sticks. That doesn’t mean that everything that they’ve since is bad. It’s just that that version of rock and roll isn’t at the centre of the zeitgeist anymore, and kids are now looking for the next thing that sets their world on fire.
