Artistic Wasteland: the musical era that Mick Jagger thought was “garbage”
All good rock and roll comes from someone who has a fire within them. No matter how great the songs sound on an acoustic guitar or how an artist can deliver them to an audience, it’s more about getting your point across and being powered by some sort of rocket fuel whenever you decide to put pen to paper when writing a track. Although Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had a slower start to writing than most of their peers, the frontman believed the generation before them had delivered absolute trash.
Because when you think about it, what did people really have to listen to before the beginnings of rock and roll? There was still music that you could play now and again for easy listening during a party, but there weren’t too many teenagers going nuts dancing to Rosemary Clooney records or anything.
The melodies may have been pretty, but Chuck Berry was the one who really exposed the genre of rock and roll to the masses. Elvis Presley might get the mantle of being the ‘King of Rock and Roll’, but Berry is the rightful godfather who deserves a place on the throne for turning the blues into something exciting on tracks like ‘Johnny B Goode’.
And since rock’s British counterparts would want to listen to something that even resembled a decent melody, Jagger spent his time joining forces with Richards and The Stones to create the best blues rock anyone had ever heard. Although Bob Dylan would eventually open everything up to new avenues, Jagger thought that he could have only gone up from what everyone else had done.
Prior to Dylan wiping everything out, Jagger believed that the lion’s share of lyrics was nothing that memorable, telling Rolling Stone, “Everyone looked up to him as being a kind of guru of lyrics. It’s hard to think of the absolute garbage that pop music really was at the time. And even if you lifted your game by a marginal amount, it really was a lot different from most everything else that had gone before in the ten years previously.”
And it’s not like Jagger doesn’t have a point, either. Regardless of the amount of blues covers the group were playing in the London clubs, a lot of the songs that were getting on the charts were more concerned with writing pieces about young love, going to a party, or the occasional track that meant absolutely nothing at all.
Even The Beatles could find themselves falling into that trap occasionally. If you listen to the covers on Please Please Me, a lot of those tracks are going more for the sound than for the lyric, which usually seems to be taking up space in between the more adventurous parts of the song.
While it took a little bit for The Stones to eventually make their way into focused lyrics, Jagger eventually bloomed as a songwriter once Dylan opened his eyes. No one writes rock and roll quite like The Rolling Stones, but a track like ‘Street Fighting Man’ can only come from someone who has listened to how Dylan weaved works like ‘Masters of War’ together.
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