WHY MICK, WHY?
Sorry, Jagger, but this song is nothing more than a masterpiece of Covidiocy, Neil Mccormick writes.
Mick Jagger has a new solo song out, and unfortunately, it is everything we have come to expect from the venerable rock legend whenever he goes behind the backs of his fellow Rolling Stones.
Titled Eazy Sleazy and newly released, it features the 77-yearold superstar channelling his teenage Johnny Rotten, sneering comically sarcastic lyrics about life during the pandemic over a raucous garage-rock clang:
“Bossed around by pr---s / Stiffen upper lips,” Jagger yelps, in that shouty voice he sometimes adopts when nobody restrains him.
“Looking at the graphs / With a magnifying glass / Cancel all the tours / Football's fake applause / No more travel brochures / Virtual premières / I've got nothing left to wear!”
We've all been there, wondering what shirt to wear to a virtual red-carpet shindig. As protest songs go, this isn't exactly Anarchy in the U.K., is it?
At one point, as Jagger bewails the privations of lockdown, he snarls, “You're trying to take the Mick!” and you momentarily wonder whether he really is?
Perhaps this is just part of some postmodern satirical commentary about lockdown art?
Jagger has form in the “clunking political protest song” department. His dreary 2017 single, England Lost, was essentially a Brexit blues, exhibiting even less nuance than his latest effort:
“I went to find England, it wasn't there / I think I lost it in the back of my chair.”
Exactly a year ago, by contrast, during our first lockdown, The Rolling Stones put out Living in a Ghost Town, which exhibits a nicely sleazy rock-reggae skank, and manages to comment on the state of the nation without laying it on with a trowel.
The “ghost town” metaphor offered a looser, more poetic frame for Jagger to wail with bluesy sorrow about widows a-weeping and no beds to sleep in. Living in a Ghost Town was their first original song since One More Shot in 2003, and it supposedly presaged a new album — on which they claim to have been working for a decade.
Yet Eazy Sleazy sounds like the kind of silliness with which bands routinely knock about in rehearsals — before they get down to business. It's all a bit of fun, but if wiser heads had prevailed, it would never have seen the light of day — or at least not until Jagger needed extra outtakes for a retrospective box set. It's interesting that in his rush quickly to record and release this masterpiece of Covidiocy, he didn't run it past his bandmates — presumably just as bored and underworked — in the Stones.
I suspect he knew what their reaction would have been to a tirade such as this: “That's a pretty mask / But never take a chance / Tik Tok stupid dance / Took a samba class / Landed on my ass / Trying to write a tune / You better hook me up to Zoom / See my poncey books / Teach myself to cook / Way too much TV / It's lobotomizing me ...”
Can this really be the work of the same man who wrote Sympathy for the Devil? “I wanted to share this song that I wrote about coming out of lockdown, with a bit of much-needed optimism,” Jagger announced in a tweet. Oh, Mick, you shouldn't have.
With Jagger on guitar, in the chunky ham-handed downstroke style he sometimes adopts when Keith Richards is looking the other way, it sounds as if the Rolling Stone had discovered punk 45 years too late. Being a well-connected legend, Jagger was able to call up the Foo Fighters' all-rounder Dave Grohl to play drums, bass and guitar, and add backing vocals, secure in the knowledge Grohl would be too dazzled to offer critical perspective. “It's hard to put into words what recording this song with
Sir Mick means to me,” Grohl accordingly said. “It's beyond a dream come true.” This is one way to avoid saying whether you think the song is any good.
Perhaps the Stones frontman had just become fed up with waiting for his bandmates to get back to making music. I choose to think of this lockdown song as a cry for help.
When Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood hear the depths to which their frontman has been driven without them, perhaps they'll summon the energy to make a musical intervention. Until then, let's leave the last line to Jagger himself: “It'll be a memory you're trying to remember to forget.”
My sentiments exactly.