Michael Philip Jagger is many things. Frontman for arguably the world’s greatest rock and roll band. Serial bedder of hot-ass women (Bianca Jagger was a dime piece…and so was Jerry Hall back in the day…hell, he’s still bedding teenage Brazilian models and he looks like a raisin these days!)
You can’t forget, as Eddie Murphy once said “Mick Jagger’s lips are so big…Black people look at him and say “he got some big-ass lips”. Ha!!!
He is also in possession of a rarely used yet always effective falsetto, which has rared it’s head in three of my favorite Stones/Jagger songs.
First off, there’s “Miss You”, one of the Stones’ biggest hits and the first of their excursions into “disco”. Even without the falsetto, this song is joyfully sleazy. I love it. To this day, “Some Girls” is my favorite Stones album (how can you not love an album with a song like “Far Away Eyes” on it?)
Two years later, the Stones were still on the disco trip and they released what I still consider to be one of their finest moments-“Emotional Rescue”. Maybe I just love it so much because, seeing as I was 4 when it came out, it’s the first Rolling Stones song I remember ever hearing. The Lurch-like spoken recitation kills me every time. Me and a co-worker used to walk around Tower Records reciting it. Yeah, I’m lame. But I had company!!
There are two versions of this video. One is in something called “Thermo-Vision”, and believe me when I say it’s damn near unwatchable. So I’m sparing you. Thank me later.
Thirteen years later, Mick Jagger the solo artist entered the Nineties with Rick Rubin behind the producer’s chair and a single, “Sweet Thing”, that harkened back to the glory days of “Miss You” and “Emotional Rescue”. The falsetto sounds a bit more weathered, but that gives it a little more character. This is actually the only Mick Jagger solo song that I’d recognize immediately upon hearing it, unless you want to count that slightly skeevy cover of “Dancing in the Streets” he did with David Bowie.
I tip my glass in tribute, yet again, to one of the world’s greatest falsettos. Go get ’em, Mick. Still kicking ass at 112 years old.
