Moves Like Jagger

During the late sixties, a phenomenon engulfed the United States. Millions, spangled in the stars and the stripes, succumbed to the to the sound of guitar wielding, redcoats, playing a rock & roll bought forth from beyond the sea. Novel, exotically foreign and daring in it is approach. This euphony emanated new vitality and represented the dawning of a new age. This was the British Invasion and Britannia ruled the airwaves.

At the forefront of this takeover were the Stones and at their helm stood none other than Mick Jagger.

Undoubtedly one of the most metaphysically inclined and intelligential performers of our era, Mick Jagger is also one of the most taciturn. The following interview is based of the October 12th, 1968 issue of Rolling Stone and should by no means be considered an authentic depiction or representation of Mick Jagger, rather an exegesis of the artist’s influence and impact. Formalities aside, let us commence…

Is it true that with songs such as "Come On" and "King Bee" you really re-discovered Slim Harpo and Chuck Berry for a majority of the American populous Who had never been exposed to that kind of music beforehand?

Yeah. Most people had no idea about it that's why we stopped doing blues. We didn't want to continue doing blues forever, just long enough to turn people on to others who were very good at it and not have to carry on the mantle ourselves. So you could say that we did blues to turn people on, but it’s beyond me why anyone would be turned on by us, frankly its unbelievably stupid. I mean what's the point in listening to cover "I'm A King Bee" when you can listen to Slim Harpo, the very man doing it himself?

So your change in style came about once you believed, a majority of people had been turned on to blues?

Honestly, I think our change came about the same time a lot of the beat groups started popping up. Back when there were no hit groups and the Beatles were playing The Cavern. We were blues purists; into all those commercial things but never had the guts to do them on stage because we were so horrible and so aware of being blues purists, you get what I mean? You see back in those days nobody knew each other. We didn't know the Beatles or the Animals from Adam, yet we were all doing the same material. We used to be so surprised to hear other people do the same things we were doing. The thing is that the public didn't know about any of this music because the record companies were issuing hundreds of singles a week so naturally most people missed a huge lot of them.

It was also at this time that you first ran into censorship problems with the words "half-assed games." Many of the disc jockeys in the United States cut that part out.

Really? Frankly I don't know what's considered rude in America cause it's all so different, isn't it! Anyway, coming down to all controversy that shrouded us in the day, we weren’t purposefully singing about subjects thought to be taboo: drugs, sex and violence. We just wanted to honestly explore a subject not otherwise discussed. Anyhow, censorship is weird.

When you first came to San Francisco in 1965, the Diggers put out a broadcast describing the Stones as the embodiment of what they called, the ‘breaking up of old values.’

Yes, this came about after a series of songs like "19th Nervous Breakdown," "Mother's Little Helpers," "Have You Seen Your Mother" . . .
 Ha-ha; "Have You Seen Your Mother" was the final straw. We came to a full stop after that. I just couldn't make it with that anymore, what more could we say. I find it all quite amusing, where you had the Beatles singing, “Let It Be,” you had us singing “Let It Bleed.” But obviously these songs bothered people because for the first time rock songs were saying things that couldn't be said before. It's spending all the time in America. All these songs were written in America. It is a great place to write because all the time you are being bombarded with all of it and you can't help but try and put it in some kind of form. As far as I'm concerned those songs just reflect what's going on. Drawing attention if you will, to society’s confusion between evil imagined and real, between arbitrary social conventions and real ethical principles. We just used the energy of these subjects to inspire our music. And at the end of the day, they simply lived up…or down to people’s expectations of them.

What would you say to people who see your songs as political or sociological statements?

Well it's interesting, but it's just the Rolling Stones sort of rambling on about what they feel. At our best, we were just testing the boundaries of the liberation so freely promised by rock. Were drugs OK? We didn’t just sing about this stuff, we experienced I firsthand, we lost Brian, and the nearly Keith…Was flirting with violence OK? Pete sake, we sang about it until someone got killed right in front of stage where we were preforming, back at the Altamont Speedway in California.

Works Cited

Cott, Johnathan. Mick Jagger: The Rolling Stone Interview . 12 October 1968. 26 September 2014 <www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-rolling-stone-interview-mick-jagger-19681012>.

Puterbaugh, Parke. The British Invasion: From the Beatles to the Stones, The Sixties Belonged to Britain . 14 July 1988. 26 September 2014 <www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-british-invasion- from-the-beatles-to-the-stones-the-sixties-belonged-to-britain-19880714>.

A Social Experiment...

As an individual who has spent a majority of his life beyond the confines and security of their home country, I have had the fortune of experiencing little lingual prejudice and ignorance.

However not all are share the favor of my charmed life, and this is a major concern of mine.

With all that man has accomplished over the last century, the human rights movement, fall of the Berlin wall and the dawn of the information age, one might expect stereotypes and preconceptions to be all but non-existent, remnants of a bygone era.

Sadly this is not the case and the subject of stereotypes faced by non-native English speakers acts as a prevalent theme in Amy Tan’s essay ‘Mother Tongue.’

And the hackneyed idea I would like to touch upon in particular would be accents…

For the sake of perspicuity, ‘accent’ is defined as the “distinctive mode of pronunciation of a language, esp. one associated with a particular nation, locality, or social class.”

In 2010, two students from the University of Chicago conducted a social experiment centered on the influence of accent on credibility.

Below, is an extract from their report that I found of particular interest:

“Most people do not know how many hours a night an ant typically sleeps, but if someone tells them that ants don't sleep, they may believe it, even if that person is not a zoologist. But people also doubt and routinely evaluate new information (Ferguson & Zayas, 2009). Such judgments of credibility could depend on how reasonable the information sounds, how credible the source appears how the person says it (e.g., Miller & Hewgill, 1964)…”

Their assessment continued to reveal the reasoning behind their postulation.

Firstly, they explained, an accent, acts as a signal, and secondly, for lack of a better term it can ‘distort’ speech, making it harder to understand. The report went on to state the reasoning behind the first statement, however the second reason, the far more critical of the two, was purely objective possessing no hard evidence.

The report went on to expound that native speakers of any language, not limited English alone, are typically very responsive to accented speech of foreign descents, and are in turn quick to draw conclusions based of those signals, casting the speaker as an outsider and foreigner. The report proceeded to expound that if left unchecked these signals produce preconceptions about the outsider that might not be necessarily true, but act as an advocate of prejudice, ultimately impacting the credibility of the speaker. Hence when a foreigner speaks, not only does their accent play a part in impacting their credibility but also the prejudice tied to it.   

I believe this evaluation provides an interesting perspective regarding the ideology and credo behind the stereotypes targeted non-native English speakers, especially those pertaining to accent.  Though these findings are among a myriad of others that agree with this conclusion, nothing is ever set in stone. Recognizing the problem and educating others about its existence is the first step towards change.

Works Cited

Garrett, Peter. "Attitudes to Language ." Garrett, Peter. Attitudes to Language .
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 124-125.

Lev-Ari, Shiri and Boaz Keysar. "Why don't we believe non-native speakers? 
The influence of accent on credibility ." 10 June 2010. 13 September 2014       <psychology.unchicago.edu/people/faculty/LevAriKeysar.pdf>.

Chapter 1...

My name is Rohan Daniel Toor and I was born on the 29th of December 1997, on the banks of the river Pampa in the town of Kozhencherry, Kerala, India.

As a child I was fortunate to have all that I could wish for, a roof over my head, parents who loved me, all the toys I could care for and a younger brother; whom I had the task to subjugate. My entire life was laid out before me. I was going to eat my veggies, study hard and grow up to become a T-Rex and in the off chance that did not come through a paleontologist would do.

As time went by, my passions and ambitions shifted with the changing of the seasons. Nowadays I no longer yearn to become a large bipedal carnivore but rather an investment banker, a far more promising future than the latter but I surely doubt as satisfying.

Having entered adolescence, there are only few things I still value in life: my church, my family, my body, my friends and my education.  

My sole goal in life is simply to live out every day to the very fullest and my greatest fear is to resign myself to a life of mediocrity.

Interestingly enough, an aspect of my being that I have not touched upon but hold in the highest regard would be my identity, as a whole. And what facet of my identity has had a larger role in shaping it but language.

For as long as I can remember, language has played an integral role in my development. The mention of the very word hearkens back to the nights my mother would read my brother and I to sleep. She did so all those years in hopes that from that early age a passion and zeal for language would be birthed within us. From that moment forth, I have not relented in my endless pursuit to devour all the literary work I have come across.

I’ve been a resident of Long Island’s Camp Half-Blood, hunted the white whale aboard the Pequod, braved the beaches of Normandy, sailed a raft with Huck and Jim, committed absurdities with Lord Emsworth and strolled down Swansway. All due, in no small part to my readings and the miracle that is language.