I apologize if it has already been posted .What do you think ?
A bit underrated point of view may be ?

Love him or hate him, there's no denying that Mick Jagger is a great songwriter ,isn't it?
But I think that what too often comes to the mind of those who don't really know the Stones when they think about Jagger is his lips ,his tight clothes and other stage wardrobes, his prancing on stage.
Not a lot about lyrics as "Sway" for instance.


[www.observer.com]

Mick Jagger :Our Most Underrated Songwriter ?

By Ron Rosenbaum
December 9, 2001 | 7:00 p.m
I learned about George Harrison after a draft of this column went to the copy editors. Reading the many well-deserved tributes he's getting now made me feel even more strongly the importance of paying tribute to artists while they're still with us rather than waiting for death to provide a "peg." It's one of the things I've tried to do since I began The Edgy Enthusiast, and you can think of this Mick Jagger tribute in that light.


Recently I came upon a startling remark by Stephen Booth, a brilliant literary scholar who occupies a special place in my pantheon for his transformative edition of Shakespeare's sonnets. (His Yale University Press commentary on the sonnets is an exhilarating exercise in polysemous pleasure–which is not as dirty as it sounds.)
Anyway, I'd been tracking down some of Mr. Booth's other essays in places like Pacific Coast Philology when I came upon that remarkable opening line from one of his essays: "Shakespeare is, of course, our most underrated poet." Shakespeare underrated ? In a tongue-in-cheek kind of way, Mr. Booth is saying that all the millions and perhaps billions of words expended on Shakespeare's poetry have still not come close to justly rating his immensity. So he's underrated!

In that spirit, I would like to argue that Mick Jagger is our most underrated songwriter. Despite the millions and millions of words expended on Mick Jagger's rock-star persona, on the mansions and the babes and the paternity suits and the Tootsie Roll soaked in acid on the tour plane (or was that Led Zeppelin?), despite–or because of–the millions and millions of words about Mick Jagger the celebrity , no one has done justice to Mick Jagger as a writer . A writer of brilliant, soulful, soaring, incantatory anthems, hymns to broken hearts (Memory Motel), broken spirits (Wild Horses) and fragmentary hopes for redemption (the incomparable Sweet Virginia). And let's not forget, at this particular moment, that he's one of the rare rock songwriters who has addressed the question of evil and apocalypse (Sympathy for the Devil, Gimme Shelter) in a sophisticated way. He's more well-known for his "Jumpin' Jack Flash" manic-exhibitionist stage persona, but he's done some killer slow, aching ballads, such as "You Can't Always Get What You Want" and "Angie" and "Time Waits for No One."
He's been doing it from the beginning of his songwriting career, with underappreciated slow-tempo numbers like "Blue Turns to Grey," "The Singer Not the Song" and one of my all-time, all-time faves, "Tell Me (You're Coming Back to Me)."
That's the one where I think he first discovered the power of incantatory repetition that transforms simple love songs into soaring sonic prayers in the gutter religion of love. Sometimes it's the despairing prayer of a Graham Greene whiskey priest, as in the almost completely overlooked "Till the Next Good Bye." Sometimes it's the bleak beauty, the spare Beckett-like eloquence of "No Expectations."
He's got another potential classic in the anthemic "Wild Horses" mode on his new solo album, Goddess in the Doorway –a song called "Don't Call Me Up." But that's not what prompted this column, or even my call to radio guru Jonathan Schwartz. No, what prompted me to call Mr. Schwartz was the dispiriting news that I first read in Page Six, that Mick Jagger's new solo album only sold a paltry 900 copies in its first week of release in the U.K.! This despite a prime-time network documentary (ABC's Being Mick Jagger ) about his living the high life, hobnobbing with Prince Charles at the royal premiere of the film he's just produced ( Enigma , starring Kate Winslet), and making music with the many children of his several wives. I say "despite" the prime-time documentary, but maybe because of it–because, again, it played into the image that people have always used to underrate him, to write him off as a jet-setting celeb these days, rather than the serious artist he was and still is. This jet-set stuff obscures the fact that Mick Jagger has written powerful songs that will last forever (the unbearably sad and beautiful "Memory Motel" will last as long as memory–or at least as long as motels). But before I go any further, I think it's important to say that when I say "Mick Jagger has written," I mean the songs that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have written. Most of them are written for Mr. Jagger's voice , for his persona. But I have a feeling that the writing credit "Jagger/Richards" represents a real collaboration, whatever the division of labor may be.* Actually, I'd love to know how Mick and Keith work together as a team. (My fantasy is to do one of those Paris Review "Writers at Work" interviews with them.)
But when I say Mick Jagger is our most underrated songwriter, I also believe he's our most underrated voice. A voice–and a delivery–that deserves comparison, by this time, with Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, Bob Dylan and Neil Young as one of the defining male voices of the century. Yes: Jagger and Sinatra. That's why I felt compelled to put in a call to my friend Jonathan Schwartz, an elegant advocate for Sinatra, Bennett, all those guys, but someone who also has a deep understanding of Dylan. I've had some of my most illuminating Dylan conversations with Jonathan, and yet I couldn't recall any real conversation about the Stones. Jonathan Schwartz, as I'm sure you know, is the gifted novelist, memoirist and host of two widely admired Saturday and Sunday afternoon music-and-meditative- monologue shows on WNYC. When I reached him, he told me he was about to send me news of an additional gig as on-air producer and programmer on a singer-songwriter channel of the new no-commercials satellite-radio service XM, where, he said, they allow him the freedom to play "deep tracks"– overlooked classics by his favorites, such as (in the order he reeled them off) Lena Horne, Count Basie, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett and that other guy he likes so much, Frank whatever. I felt that Jonathan might be the one person who could redress the imbalance in Mick Jagger's reputation, repair the underestimation of Mr. Jagger as a songwriter. I was ready to say, "See here, Jonathan, you're one of the few people who has the perspicuity to appreciate both that Frank guy and Bob Dylan. It's time you did the same for Mick Jagger's songs." But before I got two sentences into my prepared rant, Jonathan stopped me to say that, in fact, he has played Jagger on his mostly Sinatra and Tony Bennett show. He told me how he segued recently from a conga riff at the end of "Sympathy for the Devil" into Mel Tormé's "I Don't Want to Cry Anymore" in a way that perfectly "married the two genres of music," as he put it. And then he cited several other Jagger songs he'd played, including some of those classic anthemic ballads that are my favorites as well, among them "You Can't Always Get What You Want," "Wild Horses" and "Angie." I shouldn't have been surprised at Jonathan's discernment. We went on after that to consider the relationship between Jagger and Dylan as songwriters. Was Jagger, as Jonathan initially suggested, "a blue-collar Dylan"? I put it differently: Mick Jagger's audience might have been more authentically blue-collar, in the sense that Bob Dylan's initial audience bought their blue work shirts at the Harvard Co-op, so to speak. But Mick Jagger's songwriting was anything but blue-collar, even when–Jonathan had a point here–portraying blue-collar kids in "Satisfaction" and "Street Fighting Man." Mick Jagger, I argued, was more of an aesthete in the sense that his art–or part of his art–was not to call attention to his art. Not to call attention the way Dylan did, with over-the-top verbal pyrotechnics, at least until Dylan shifted into a new, more pared-down mode of songwriting with Blood on the Tracks –not necessarily better, perhaps, or as novel as the Highway 61-Blonde on Blonde Dylan, but very, well, Jaggeresque. (I await the sensitively written Ph.D. thesis comparing "Gimme Shelter" with Shelter from the Storm.) Meanwhile, though, Mick Jagger–always a peacock on stage–was, in his ballads, more in the mode (or the pose) of the aristo-poet than the blue-collar rocker.
At his unaffected best, Jagger can display flashes of the tossed-off brilliance of Byron. But there's something else about Jagger that defines him as a songwriter, defines him as a singer–something that doesn't necessarily appear on a lyric sheet. It's his beautiful use of incantation. Incantation : a lovely word for a special kind of vocal recurrence, one that combines overtones of prayer, magic, spell casting, all that. Incantation: It's a kind of vocal voodoo that has almost completely overcome the genius of Van Morrison, so that sometimes you feel he's only about incantation. Ecstatic incantation: It's what defines rock music against the "standards" given such knee-jerk reverence by young fogies and old. (Well, maybe that and the Little Richard-like, ecstatic " Whooo-oooo! " that made the Beatles the Beatles.) But what made the Stones the Stones is Jagger's jagged-edge incantation. No one does more with the incantation of a first line–a focused incantation–than Jagger. It's there in the beautiful, desperate, hopeless urgency of "Tell Me (You're Comin' Back to Me)." And in the way it's not just "Wild Horses" but "Wild, wild horses." And then there's the amazing apocalyptic couplet that fades to infinity in "Gimme Shelter": War …it's just a shot away, shot away, shot away Love …it's just a kiss away, kiss away, kiss away…. (By the way, has anyone ever compressed a deeper truth about human nature in two lines of a song?) It's not "You're just a memory," but "You're just a memory, just a memory, just a memory" in "Memory Motel." Each incantatory reiteration of "memory" conjuring up a very real ghost, rather than consigning the unquiet spirit to the memory hole–which is the ostensible declarative intent of the song. So many Jagger/Richards songs deal with time (and, implicitly, memory), don't they? "Time Is on My Side" ("Time, time, TIME / Is on my side … yes it is"), "Good Times, Bad Times," "Out of Time," "This Could Be the Last Time" …. I've celebrated before the brilliant visionary metaphysics of "Time Waits for No One," with Mick Taylor's guitar somehow spilling out a vision of beauty and complexity that virtually translates Stephen Hawking's theory of "imaginary time" into guitar runs. String theory! Recently, I came across an extraordinary phrase in a poem by Robert Lowell: We are all old-timers, Each of us holds a locked razor. I found it in the foreword of the fascinating book I'd just picked up, Gracefully Insane (by the Boston Globe writer Alex Beam). It's about McLean's, that remarkable institution right outside Boston where some of the best and brightest madmen and madwomen, from Lowell to Sylvia Plath to Susanna Kaysen, were resident–some recurrently, like Lowell. In a section of "Waking in the Blue," Lowell talks about waking up there and then glimpsing the "shaky future grow familiar" in those who were older and had been there longer–and more often. Thus: We are all old-timers, Each of us holds a locked razor . For Lowell, the "locked razor" suggests mortality, insanity. In the songs of Mick Jagger, the "locked razor" is the heart, a ticking time bomb–the locked razor whose jagged edge scars when it opens.



I am a Frenchie ,as Mick affectionately called them in the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1977 .



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2009-04-08 12:39 by SwayStones.

Interesting, but I think Keith wrote Gimme Shelter...

JR



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2009-04-07 15:33 by stone-relics.

Well, I think it´s hard to be underrated when you have written songs for the Rolling Stones. It was a great success, wasn´t it? Paul Westerberg, Roky Erickson...THERE you have guys who - with any justice in this world - should have been more successful!!!

How can you be underrated when the songs you wrote sell over 200 million copies, turns the band into a multi-billion multinational company, and leaves you and the other bandmembers multi-milionairs?

Mathijs

Quote
Bjorn
Well, I think it´s hard to be underrated when you have written songs for the Rolling Stones. It was a great success, wasn´t it? Paul Westerberg, Roky Erickson...THERE you have guys who - with any justice in this world - should have been more successful!!!

yeah roky erickson is @#$%& amazing!

Quote
Mathijs
How can you be underrated when the songs you wrote sell over 200 million copies, turns the band into a multi-billion multinational company, and leaves you and the other bandmembers multi-milionairs?

Mathijs

you're right, but i know what swaystones wants to say.
most people (who are not really into the stones) see jagger as a sexsymbol or businessman and not as a genius songwriter!

John Hiatt is underrated

I could never think of Mick Jagger as underrated.
He's massively celebrated in every language on Earth...

Quote
guitarbastard

Quote
Mathijs
How can you be underrated when the songs you wrote sell over 200 million copies, turns the band into a multi-billion multinational company, and leaves you and the other bandmembers multi-milionairs?

Mathijs

you're right, but i know what swaystones wants to say.
most people (who are not really into the stones) see jagger as a sexsymbol or businessman and not as a genius songwriter!

Yes,you get the point guitarbastard

I think I AM a frivolous person. That's why it's hard for me to talk about (the meaning of my songs). I don't print the words on the record; if you can't hear them it's too bad. I don't think they're great works of poetry.

- Mick Jagger, 1983



I am a Frenchie ,as Mick affectionately called them in the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1977 .

I think the seriousness of his late 60s-early 70s songs is sometimes recognized, and he actually has stabs at maturity beginning in the late 70s. Even Primitive Cool attempts to say something. But the way he has churned out songs since then has been mainly to the detriment of his reputation. Even when the songs are pretty good, they're very formulaic and sound as if he had used a rhyming dictionary.

No way!

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cc
Even when the songs are pretty good, they're very formulaic and sound as if he had used a rhyming dictionary.

Seriously ,what do you think of Oh No ,Not You Again lyrics ?

I am really really fond of the song ,the lyrics sounds good "in a rythm way" as you say ,the lyrics sound pretty good and funny too to my "french ears" ( Oh no, not you again, F*****g up my life ,It was bad the first time ,I can't stand it twice .....All is perfect but I'm allergic To your business stares )

But as English speakers,"The setting's so romantic ,Love is in the air " might sound a bit ridiculous ,may not it ?
NB:Is "may not it" the wrong question tag ?



I am a Frenchie ,as Mick affectionately called them in the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1977 .

Quote
Mathijs
How can you be underrated when the songs you wrote sell over 200 million copies, turns the band into a multi-billion multinational company, and leaves you and the other bandmembers multi-milionairs?

Mathijs

If we take the only criteria to be ability to sell a lot of records and make a lot of money, surely Jagger is one of the biggest song writers of all time - for example, someone like Bob Dylan is quite a small and provencional figure compared to him. But I don't think the point asked here does refere this kind of criteria.

To an extent I think it is true that Jagger is underrated. First of all, the thing is that he has excellence elsewhere that seem to shadow his songcraft talents. Like said here, Jagger's showmanship and public - controversial -reputation is too huge. (And I think Mick actually is more important as a performer than as a song writer, to be sure). I think it is quite common that people don't think that Jagger is a "serious " songwriter at all. I have wittnessed this phenomoenon many times. I would say that Jagger/Richards songwriter team over-all is not so much appreciated at all as we might think here at IORR, and "people" - the masses and professionals, too - have maybe too narrow kind of idea of their ability. This is not a claim, but an observation. I guess that is also to do with their reputation - "It's Only Rock&Roll", "The Greatest Rock and Roll Band In the World" gives quite one dimensional picture of their talent.

Secondly, I would say that Jagger is underrated also within the context of the Rolling Stones. Namely, it is also quite commonly assumed that Keith Richards is the true genious within the band, and Jagger is just making some lyrics and icing the cake (and taking care of the business). I think there are quite many here at IORR that might have this kind of idea in their minds. Jagger is too calculative, too business-oriented, too "Jagger" to be really creative talent or artist like Keith is.

I don't think Mick Jagger will be remembered in the years to come as any big song writer (what he, no doubt, is) but for something else.

- Doxa

pretty hard to take him seriously as a song-writer for the past 3 decades. for a decade or so prior i think he and keith were very highly regarded as rock'n'roll songsmiths...and rightly so.

Tell me what it means to be underrated? How does one go higher? Where is the top? What doe it fatfucking matter? Underrated? What, if he was rated higher - what does that mean? It doesn't matter. I don't get the importance of it - it changes nothing.

Jason Isbell, when he was with the Drive-By Truckers, wrote probably the most beautiful ballad EVER, called Goddamn Lonely Love. Do I think he's underrated? He's written other fantastic songs - and some that aren't so great. It doesn't matter.

oh, that is a thread for me! thank you!

I think it is true what Doxa said. I often think it is a shame how much Mick gets underrated among Stones-fans. Many believe that Keith is the true talent, while Mick is only interested in making money.
It seems to be impossible, to be able to do both - organizing and writing songs.
He wrote half of all songs, if not more, not only for the last 20 years, but very often he is only seen as the performer and the person, who ads some words.

In most cases Mick wrote the lyrics and the vocal melody, and these are the parts which get songwriting cedit. For many other songs he arranged the music like Keith did. Even Stu said, Mick´s input in the music is the same as Keith´s.

But, Doxa, I think it is more important to be recognised as a great songwriter, rather than a good performer.

Underrated? What does it mean? To me it´s - someone who creates good stuff, compared to the best - and still no one cares!!! (could be timing, looks or whatever)

Mick has been noticed, allright. For his songwriting. Jagger/Richards, the Glimmer Twins. And THE MOST underrated?...no, no. That´s probably someone we haven´t heard of...That´s my thoughts on this matter.

gosh mick would be heralded a transformative great writer and stylist and singer and visionary and raw and knowing and vulnerable fierce soul if all he had EVER done was SFTD (orig. studio version and full lyrics)...MEAN IT...Get down IN IT....and such..great writer of substantial stuff... and lots of berryish primal power in the lyrics to rip this joint...and i guess anyone in HERE could go on bout dozens of truly great songs...amidst some clunkers and junkers of course...mebbe it's a generational thing...this being 'underrated'...are the stones on itunes??
i do NOT see them in a lot of my hip friends in their twenties and thirties puter playlists for some reason??
and it always pains me...i KNOW when exposed to '12 by 5' and a lot of the early raw stuff they would uncover a miracle...they grew up w/ madonna and stuff...like a lot of folkes on iorr...but the iorrs are obviously mainline rock soul junkies to the uber max...
...i'm 50 plus and just naturally have always accepted glims, even at the earliets, with great pop plaintive lyrical craft ala tell me and tons of the other early singles too...impossible to over=rate sftd etc...no?

Jesus, hasn't Ron Rosenbaum ever heard of paragraph breaks? whoever the online editor is over there should be fired. Maybe it's because I work for a newspaper but that article is a hard read, aesthetically-speaking.

I don't need much txt for this one........Bull Shit

Actually I didn' need txt, this is enough.......



__________________________

I think Mick USED to be an underrated songwriter, but with lyrics like this, not any more:

You're awful bright
You're awful smart
I must admit
You broke my heart
The awful truth
Is really sad
I must admit
I was awful bad
While lovers laugh
And music plays
I stumble by
And hide my pain
Mmmm, the lamps are lit
The moon is gone
I think I've crossed
The Rubicon

Quote
Doxa

Namely, it is also quite commonly assumed that Keith Richards is the true genious within the band, and Jagger is just making some lyrics and icing the cake (and taking care of the business).
- Doxa

And I personally think that is the actual case. Concerning writing songs, melodies and riffs Richards has the true talent, even though Jagger has written some very good ones.

Mathijs

Quote
SwayStones
I apologize if it has already been posted .What do you think ?
A bit underrated point of view may be ?

Love him or hate him, there's no denying that Mick Jagger is a great songwriter ,isn't it?
But I think that what too often comes to the mind of those who don't really know the Stones when they think about Jagger is his lips ,his tight clothes and other stage wardrobes, his prancing on stage.
Not a lot about lyrics as "Sway" for instance.


[www.observer.com]

Mick Jagger :Our Most Underrated Songwriter ?

By Ron Rosenbaum
December 9, 2001 | 7:00 p.m
I learned about George Harrison after a draft of this column went to the copy editors. Reading the many well-deserved tributes he's getting now made me feel even more strongly the importance of paying tribute to artists while they're still with us rather than waiting for death to provide a "peg." It's one of the things I've tried to do since I began The Edgy Enthusiast, and you can think of this Mick Jagger tribute in that light.

Recently I came upon a startling remark by Stephen Booth, a brilliant literary scholar who occupies a special place in my pantheon for his transformative edition of Shakespeare's sonnets. (His Yale University Press commentary on the sonnets is an exhilarating exercise in polysemous pleasure–which is not as dirty as it sounds.) Anyway, I'd been tracking down some of Mr. Booth's other essays in places like Pacific Coast Philology when I came upon that remarkable opening line from one of his essays: "Shakespeare is, of course, our most underrated poet." Shakespeare underrated ? In a tongue-in-cheek kind of way, Mr. Booth is saying that all the millions and perhaps billions of words expended on Shakespeare's poetry have still not come close to justly rating his immensity. So he's underrated! In that spirit, I would like to argue that Mick Jagger is our most underrated songwriter. Despite the millions and millions of words expended on Mick Jagger's rock-star persona, on the mansions and the babes and the paternity suits and the Tootsie Roll soaked in acid on the tour plane (or was that Led Zeppelin?), despite–or because of–the millions and millions of words about Mick Jagger the celebrity , no one has done justice to Mick Jagger as a writer . A writer of brilliant, soulful, soaring, incantatory anthems, hymns to broken hearts (Memory Motel), broken spirits (Wild Horses) and fragmentary hopes for redemption (the incomparable Sweet Virginia). And let's not forget, at this particular moment, that he's one of the rare rock songwriters who has addressed the question of evil and apocalypse (Sympathy for the Devil, Gimme Shelter) in a sophisticated way. He's more well-known for his "Jumpin' Jack Flash" manic-exhibitionist stage persona, but he's done some killer slow, aching ballads, such as "You Can't Always Get What You Want" and "Angie" and "Time Waits for No One." He's been doing it from the beginning of his songwriting career, with underappreciated slow-tempo numbers like "Blue Turns to Grey," "The Singer Not the Song" and one of my all-time, all-time faves, "Tell Me (You're Coming Back to Me)." That's the one where I think he first discovered the power of incantatory repetition that transforms simple love songs into soaring sonic prayers in the gutter religion of love. Sometimes it's the despairing prayer of a Graham Greene whiskey priest, as in the almost completely overlooked "Till the Next Good Bye." Sometimes it's the bleak beauty, the spare Beckett-like eloquence of "No Expectations." He's got another potential classic in the anthemic "Wild Horses" mode on his new solo album, Goddess in the Doorway –a song called "Don't Call Me Up." But that's not what prompted this column, or even my call to radio guru Jonathan Schwartz. No, what prompted me to call Mr. Schwartz was the dispiriting news that I first read in Page Six, that Mick Jagger's new solo album only sold a paltry 900 copies in its first week of release in the U.K.! This despite a prime-time network documentary (ABC's Being Mick Jagger ) about his living the high life, hobnobbing with Prince Charles at the royal premiere of the film he's just produced ( Enigma , starring Kate Winslet), and making music with the many children of his several wives. I say "despite" the prime-time documentary, but maybe because of it–because, again, it played into the image that people have always used to underrate him, to write him off as a jet-setting celeb these days, rather than the serious artist he was and still is. This jet-set stuff obscures the fact that Mick Jagger has written powerful songs that will last forever (the unbearably sad and beautiful "Memory Motel" will last as long as memory–or at least as long as motels). But before I go any further, I think it's important to say that when I say "Mick Jagger has written," I mean the songs that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have written. Most of them are written for Mr. Jagger's voice , for his persona. But I have a feeling that the writing credit "Jagger/Richards" represents a real collaboration, whatever the division of labor may be.* Actually, I'd love to know how Mick and Keith work together as a team. (My fantasy is to do one of those Paris Review "Writers at Work" interviews with them.) But when I say Mick Jagger is our most underrated songwriter, I also believe he's our most underrated voice. A voice–and a delivery–that deserves comparison, by this time, with Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, Bob Dylan and Neil Young as one of the defining male voices of the century. Yes: Jagger and Sinatra. That's why I felt compelled to put in a call to my friend Jonathan Schwartz, an elegant advocate for Sinatra, Bennett, all those guys, but someone who also has a deep understanding of Dylan. I've had some of my most illuminating Dylan conversations with Jonathan, and yet I couldn't recall any real conversation about the Stones. Jonathan Schwartz, as I'm sure you know, is the gifted novelist, memoirist and host of two widely admired Saturday and Sunday afternoon music-and-meditative- monologue shows on WNYC. When I reached him, he told me he was about to send me news of an additional gig as on-air producer and programmer on a singer-songwriter channel of the new no-commercials satellite-radio service XM, where, he said, they allow him the freedom to play "deep tracks"– overlooked classics by his favorites, such as (in the order he reeled them off) Lena Horne, Count Basie, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett and that other guy he likes so much, Frank whatever. I felt that Jonathan might be the one person who could redress the imbalance in Mick Jagger's reputation, repair the underestimation of Mr. Jagger as a songwriter. I was ready to say, "See here, Jonathan, you're one of the few people who has the perspicuity to appreciate both that Frank guy and Bob Dylan. It's time you did the same for Mick Jagger's songs." But before I got two sentences into my prepared rant, Jonathan stopped me to say that, in fact, he has played Jagger on his mostly Sinatra and Tony Bennett show. He told me how he segued recently from a conga riff at the end of "Sympathy for the Devil" into Mel Tormé's "I Don't Want to Cry Anymore" in a way that perfectly "married the two genres of music," as he put it. And then he cited several other Jagger songs he'd played, including some of those classic anthemic ballads that are my favorites as well, among them "You Can't Always Get What You Want," "Wild Horses" and "Angie." I shouldn't have been surprised at Jonathan's discernment. We went on after that to consider the relationship between Jagger and Dylan as songwriters. Was Jagger, as Jonathan initially suggested, "a blue-collar Dylan"? I put it differently: Mick Jagger's audience might have been more authentically blue-collar, in the sense that Bob Dylan's initial audience bought their blue work shirts at the Harvard Co-op, so to speak. But Mick Jagger's songwriting was anything but blue-collar, even when–Jonathan had a point here–portraying blue-collar kids in "Satisfaction" and "Street Fighting Man." Mick Jagger, I argued, was more of an aesthete in the sense that his art–or part of his art–was not to call attention to his art. Not to call attention the way Dylan did, with over-the-top verbal pyrotechnics, at least until Dylan shifted into a new, more pared-down mode of songwriting with Blood on the Tracks –not necessarily better, perhaps, or as novel as the Highway 61-Blonde on Blonde Dylan, but very, well, Jaggeresque. (I await the sensitively written Ph.D. thesis comparing "Gimme Shelter" with Shelter from the Storm.) Meanwhile, though, Mick Jagger–always a peacock on stage–was, in his ballads, more in the mode (or the pose) of the aristo-poet than the blue-collar rocker. At his unaffected best, Jagger can display flashes of the tossed-off brilliance of Byron. But there's something else about Jagger that defines him as a songwriter, defines him as a singer–something that doesn't necessarily appear on a lyric sheet. It's his beautiful use of incantation. Incantation : a lovely word for a special kind of vocal recurrence, one that combines overtones of prayer, magic, spell casting, all that. Incantation: It's a kind of vocal voodoo that has almost completely overcome the genius of Van Morrison, so that sometimes you feel he's only about incantation. Ecstatic incantation: It's what defines rock music against the "standards" given such knee-jerk reverence by young fogies and old. (Well, maybe that and the Little Richard-like, ecstatic " Whooo-oooo! " that made the Beatles the Beatles.) But what made the Stones the Stones is Jagger's jagged-edge incantation. No one does more with the incantation of a first line–a focused incantation–than Jagger. It's there in the beautiful, desperate, hopeless urgency of "Tell Me (You're Comin' Back to Me)." And in the way it's not just "Wild Horses" but "Wild, wild horses." And then there's the amazing apocalyptic couplet that fades to infinity in "Gimme Shelter": War …it's just a shot away, shot away, shot away Love …it's just a kiss away, kiss away, kiss away…. (By the way, has anyone ever compressed a deeper truth about human nature in two lines of a song?) It's not "You're just a memory," but "You're just a memory, just a memory, just a memory" in "Memory Motel." Each incantatory reiteration of "memory" conjuring up a very real ghost, rather than consigning the unquiet spirit to the memory hole–which is the ostensible declarative intent of the song. So many Jagger/Richards songs deal with time (and, implicitly, memory), don't they? "Time Is on My Side" ("Time, time, TIME / Is on my side … yes it is"), "Good Times, Bad Times," "Out of Time," "This Could Be the Last Time" …. I've celebrated before the brilliant visionary metaphysics of "Time Waits for No One," with Mick Taylor's guitar somehow spilling out a vision of beauty and complexity that virtually translates Stephen Hawking's theory of "imaginary time" into guitar runs. String theory! Recently, I came across an extraordinary phrase in a poem by Robert Lowell: We are all old-timers, Each of us holds a locked razor. I found it in the foreword of the fascinating book I'd just picked up, Gracefully Insane (by the Boston Globe writer Alex Beam). It's about McLean's, that remarkable institution right outside Boston where some of the best and brightest madmen and madwomen, from Lowell to Sylvia Plath to Susanna Kaysen, were resident–some recurrently, like Lowell. In a section of "Waking in the Blue," Lowell talks about waking up there and then glimpsing the "shaky future grow familiar" in those who were older and had been there longer–and more often. Thus: We are all old-timers, Each of us holds a locked razor . For Lowell, the "locked razor" suggests mortality, insanity. In the songs of Mick Jagger, the "locked razor" is the heart, a ticking time bomb–the locked razor whose jagged edge scars when it opens.

Do you expect me to read this?

Eh, Mick does have a knack for taking away 10 fold from his better writing. Streets Of Love is a fantastic example. YECK. Makes one wonder what happened to the dude who was way in his head for SFTD, Sway, Street Fighting Man, Shattered, quite a few others. Then we get SOL and Always Suffering, Stealing My Heart, Winning Ugly, Rock And A Hard Place, etc...

..........no that would be Leonard Cohen.

I must admit, micks awfully good

I think people do care. Therefor, does that mean Mick is overrated? How about just, what, what is the middle? Rated? He's a rated songwriter. You can take SFTD and say It's his best BUT then bring up, I dunno, Luxury, which is total crap. So therefor he's overrated for SFTD.

Mick started to loose his "touch" with doing Goats Head Soup!

While there is still some great stuff on that album, with songs like Dancing with Mr. D he really began to write bland and redicioulous songs full of empty phrases.

Such lyrics weren't on Exile and Bleed and are 2000 Light years from a song like Sympathy for the devil!

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CousinC
Mick started to loose his "touch" with doing Goats Head Soup!

...wow.......I disagree...for Star @#$%& alone he gets a pass....that's one of the cheekiest and smartest songs ever written in rock n roll.

But by GHS there was nothing left to say. So he started having fun with it all. Then he followed it up with IORR, a horrible song no matter what, that was making fun of ALL OF IT.

So it didn't matter anymore. It still doesn't - because people would rather hear SFTD then She's So Cold or Tie You Up or Hang Fire or Out Of Tears or Laugh, I Nearly Died or Crazy Mama or...nothing but Hot Rocks/warhorses!

Mick Jagger has written many great songs, some of which are on ABB.

He's an intelligent person who loves words and he'll always have something to say.