Mick Jagger: “Rock isn’t dead, it’s just different”

Mick Jagger he firmly rejected the idea that rock is dead, arguing that the genre did not disappear, but simply evolved with the passage of time. The frontman of Rolling Stones addressed the topic in a recent interview, when the host introduced the widespread view that “rock is dead.” Instead of rejecting modern music or defending the past too vehemently, Jagger explained that rock can still be relevant if it is shaped differently. He gave the song as an example “Angry” of his Rolling Stones.

This is the thought of the 82-year-old English musician: “Let me explain, ‘Angry’ is a rock song for our times, in a way, because it has a lot of space… compared to the rock songs of previous eras, where a lot of things were happening at the same time. But this one always gets smaller. There’s just bass, drums and vocals. Just guitars and bass. So, there’s a lot of space in a song like ‘Angry,’ which makes it sound more current than it would have in the ’70s or ’80.”

“Angry”
was released as the first single of
“Hackney Diamonds”
(
read the review here
), the album of
Rolling Stones
of 2023. The album was the band’s first album of unreleased material from
“A Bigger Bang”
(
read the review here
) released eighteen years earlier, in 2005.