The Jagger Effect

Rolling Stones frontman, Mick Jagger, is like a member of our extended family—not that he’s aware of that, of course. My husband, who is a couple of decades younger than Mick, looks very much like the rock star—in his younger days before all the drugs and hard, hard living. When we’re playing around in the heart of the family at home, Ben can give a perfect imitation of Mick’s pout, strut, and posturing. I tell him he could have had a great career as a rock star if he weren’t so civilized and nice. The audio tech of the local library where we do a lot of literary programs jokingly refers to Ben as Mr. Jagger, and I’ve been known to tell online friends to find us at conferences by looking for the woman who looks like Wilma Mankiller with the man who looks like Mick Jagger.

When our youngest was a first-grader and Ben had to be gone on business to New York all one summer, youngest and I found a coffee-table book about Jagger’s life with tons of photos of the young Mick, who looked just like our missing husband and father. We just about wore out those pages that summer. They were our substitute for the man we loved and missed so much. So, without his knowledge, Mick has over the years become a sort of distant relative, the kind you might mention now and then but see only on the rarest occasions, a second cousin twice-removed or something like that. We don’t go to concerts or watch music videos or rock programming on TV, so he’s always just been out there, getting older, getting publicity now and then for something or other, good or bad.

Last night, however, a writer friend posted on Facebook a video of Mick and the Rolling Stones on one of their recent tours doing one of their classic numbers. I’d been writing all day and then judging book manuscripts all evening, so I was brain-dead and clicked on the music video, something I seldom do. Ben came in during the video, and we laughed about how Mick still had the strut and moves.

The You Tube channel we’d been shifted to showed Rolling Stones videos from the most recent tour back to the early 1960s. So for fun, we clicked on a video in 1969 of the Stones, remembering what a groundbreakingly wild rebel Mick had been onstage in those days and expecting to see the real primal energy of which the recent performance was just a shadow.

What a surprise! Tame and timid was what we found. We thought it must have been because it was in a TV studio and Mick just didn’t have enough room to really kick it, so we started surfing through the videos. Over and over, the early performances were tepid while they grew more energetic and rowdy the later they had been filmed. We kept marveling at how revolutionary and unthinkably wild the original performances had been deemed by the media and by our younger selves.

Finally, we hit upon the video of the classic “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” with Mick in his androgynous white tutu dress over white tights. I’d attended the concert that had been filmed and remembered it as such a gasp-causing, almost illicitly sexual performance, and Ben had read many articles describing it as the same. It was a real bore.

As we talked about it, we realized that the world in general, and the music and entertainment world in particular, had continued to move into those once-forbidden areas, so now Mick and his band had to exaggerate and parody their older selves in order to stay ahead of the pack. Those early performances were wild and primal—for their time. But today they’d only elicit yawns because the world has moved past all those old boundaries. 

I found myself wondering if the same thing, what I started calling “the Jagger effect,” wasn’t happening in books and movies, as well. I thought of how the thriller field, especially the books dealing with serial killers, tends to become more violent, cruel, and gory all the time—to the point that some people have started to call the worst of it “torture porn.” I thought of the genre of romance, which seems to have moved more heavily in the direction of erotica, a whole new genre that’s cropped up. I wonder if writers, like Mick Jagger, don’t have to keep pushing the limits because the limits are further and further out each day, month, and year. I, especially, wondered at my—and my husband’s—now-tepid reactions to the earlier videos of performances we’d loved and once gasped at in shock. As standards move with time, do we as audiences push our performers and artists to find new limits to break?

I don’t have any answers. I just keep coming up with more questions as I consider this whole situation. What do you think about all this?