In Popular Culture
From the time that the Rolling Stones developed their anti-establishment image in the mid-1960s, Mick Jagger, with guitarist Keith Richards, has been an enduring icon of the counterculture. This was enhanced by his controversial drug-related arrests, sexually charged on stage antics, provocative song lyrics, and his role of the bisexual Turner in the 1970 film Performance. One of his biographers, Christopher Andersen, describes him as "one of the dominant cultural figures of our time", adding that Jagger was "the story of a generation".
Jagger, who at the time described himself as an anarchist and espoused the leftist slogans of the era, took part in a demonstration against the Vietnam War outside the US Embassy in London in 1968. This event inspired him to write "Street Fighting Man" that same year.
A variety of celebrities attended a lavish party at New York's St. Regis Hotel to celebrate Jagger's 29th birthday and the end of the band's 1972 American tour. The party made the front pages of the leading New York newspapers.
Pop artist Andy Warhol painted a series of silkscreen portraits of Jagger in 1975, one of which was owned by Farah Diba, wife of the Shah of Iran. It hung on a wall inside the royal palace in Teheran. In 1967, Cecil Beaton photographed Jagger's naked buttocks, a photo that sold at Sotheby's auction house in 1986 for $4,000.
Jagger was allegedly a contender for the anonymous subject of Carly Simon's 1973 hit song "You're So Vain", in which he sings backing vocals. Although Don McLean does not use Jagger's name in his famous song "American Pie", he alludes to Jagger onstage at Altamont, calling him Satan.
Jagger's spirited vocal delivery is recognised by rapper Kanye West during the first verse of the 2008 T.I. and Jay-Z single "Swagga Like Us".
In 2010, a retrospective exhibition of portraits of Mick Jagger was presented at the festival Rencontres d'Arles, in France. The catalogue of the exhibition is the first photo album of Mick Jagger and shows his evolution over 50 years.
Maroon 5's popular song "Moves like Jagger" is about Jagger. Jagger himself acknowledged the song in an interview, calling the concept "very flattering." Jagger is also referenced in Kesha's song "Tik Tok" and the Black Eyed Peas' hit "The Time (Dirty Bit)".
Read more about this topic: Mick Jagger
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The very nursery tales of this generation were the nursery tales of primeval races. They migrate from east to west, and again from west to east; now expanded into the “tale divine” of bards, now shrunk into a popular rhyme.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)