Jagger defies gravity

Press, 14 March 1985, Page 10

Jagger defies gravity

By

STEPHEN HOLDEN

of the “New York Times”

One of the fascinations of following Mick Jagger’s life and times is the spectacle of rock music’s most enduring symbol of voluptuary chic defying gravity year after year. At 41, the Rolling Stones’s lead singer can still get away with acting like an insolent Pan pirouetting on a tightwire and flashing come-hither glances designed to inflame every conceivable fantasy. In his impeccably fashionable first solo album, “She’s The Boss,” Jagger is still a kinetic vocal wonder, both leonine and funny, but the lion seems more like a clown than a noble beast.

“She’s The Boss” tantalises, taunts and puts us on with a dance-oriented set of songs that portray love as a seedy high stakes casino game — a series of comic ploys and bluffs set in a Bohemian high society that Jagger more than any other rock star has come to represent. Not since David Bowie’s 1983 blockbuster, “Let’s Dance,” has an album by a major star summarised so many of the hipper trends in rock. Nile Rodgers, who produced “Let’s Dance,” as well as Madonna’s “Like A Virgin,” worked with Jagger on three cuts. And Bill Laswell, one of the architects of Herbie Hancock’s hip-hop landmark, “Rockit,” co-produced the other six. Their handiwork, plus the contributions of a slew of well-known guests, including Hancock, Jeff Beck, Sly Dunbar, Robbie Shakespeare, and Pete Townshend, has yielded a lively, groove-oriented record designed for the dance floor. In contrast to the Rolling Stones’s albums, which have always conveyed the sound of a working two-guitar band, Jagger’s solo record is a studio collage in which as many as four different guitar styles coincide on a single cut. With aural references that run from Prince (oracular, subterranean electronic voices) to “Rockit” (snatches of clattering electronic percussion) and instrumental textures that blend the astringency of

“Let’s Dance” with the sparkle of “Like A Virgin,” the sound of the record couldn’t be more up-to-date. Its only commercial liability is a dearth of catchy tunes. The attitude of the songs on Jagger’s solo record differs markedly from that of the Rolling Stones. Where Jagger and Keith Richards’s collaborations for the band project a generic renegade defiance and an atmosphere of physical violence, “She’s The Boss” is set on pricier urban real estate. It’s all about the fun, the absurdity, and the loneliness of being Mick Jagger, rock’s carefree Harlequin

extraordinaire. If we are to believe Jagger’s songs, the women he allows into his world wield an inordinate psychological control that he is happy to allow. Tongue-in-cheek erotic farce set in and around Manhattan. If the sound of the album conjures a downtown New York dance palace at 2 a.m., the songs portray the relationships among the tireless denizens of the scene as rough-and-tumble mercenary contests. In this gleefully sleazy combat zone, the hedonistic protagonists are too busy trying to outmanoeuvre one another to express much tenderness or achieve intimacy, and romance is a lot like prostitution. If Jagger’s songs admit a surprising amount of vulnerability, the singer doesn’t sound like a wounded puppy so much as a high roller trapped in a prison of his own devising. Jagger, after all, has been inseparable from his self-created myth of the Mephistophelean bon vivant for well over a decade and a half. And the only way to avoid being totally swallowed up by the myth has been to treat it lightly, use it as a game. But time has a way of warping even the most craftily constructed legends. From a rock singer and songwriter speaking directly to his own generation, Jagger has become an abstract, celestial symbol. Instead of representing any constituency, he stands

for something vague yet monumental — rock naughtiness itself — and the album’s unrelenting tone of amused sarcasm suggests the defensive attitude of someone who knows he can’t take himself too seriously.

From a student of American blues and soul music, Jagger has become a musical caricature, both of his original idols and of himself. With its exaggeratedly caterwauling vowel inflections, gasping hesitations and affected hipster tone, his singing is consciously, an'd outrageously mannered, layered in irony, cynicism and knowingness.

Even the more reflective songs on “She’s The Boss” are rendered with an acidic sense of the absurd.

The album’s title cut, which Jagger wrote with the guitarist Carlos Alomar, is less of a song than a

farcical rock-reggae playlet about sexual role reversal in which the singer adopts an “Amos ’n’ Andy” dialect to play the dual roles of bossy woman and her sullen boyfriend. What ultimately makes Jagger more compelling than ludicrous is his own acute sense of the incongruity of being an over-40 pop aristocrat assuming the raw, streetwise attitude of people half his age.

Any contempt we could heap on this kind of roleplaying the singer has already expressed himself with a savage self-mockery that pre-empts criticism. In spite of his defensiveness, Mick Jagger, outside the context of the Rolling Stones, seems more exposed than he ever has before. He seems to have arrived at a perilous crossing where rock, disco and stand-up comedy merge into something that remains to be defined.