The one musician Mick Jagger said “outperformed everyone”

Joe Taysom@josephtaysom

The musician Mick Jagger said had limitless talent: “He outperformed almost everyone”

Fri 26 April 2024 16:29, UK

Over the last 60 years, The Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger has seen many artists fly high before fluttering off into obscurity. Finding fame in the 1960s as a host of incredible acts joined him in creating the foundations of rock and roll, Jagger’s keen eye on what makes a truly inspirational musician is undebatable. The singer has rubbed shoulders with more outstanding performers than any other, but despite his experience, Jagger believes one late talent was cut from a different cloth from the rest.

Alongside Keith Richards and the rest of his band, Jagger has been around the block enough times to be able to sniff out a pretender and to know when somebody is the real deal. There was one particular musician who stank to high heavens of pure class. When he first became aware of Prince, The Rolling Stones leader was immediately captivated by what he heard and reached out to him regarding a support slot.

This moment was extremely early on in Prince’s career. His funk-infused musical stylings were yet to be fully welcomed by the public, not least by the crowd who frequented Stones concerts around that time. The Stones and ‘The Purple One’ sharing a bill for two nights at the LA Coliseum should have been a dream, but it all went horrifically wrong, and Prince bombed.

Things seemed destined to go wrong from the start. His effeminate appearance worked up the crowd without him even playing a note. Things got much worse as those same fans then jeered him and allegedly used racial insults, which prompted a tearful exit which saw Prince fly back to Minnesota before the second show.

Jagger, who was upset by the scenes, persuaded Prince to return to Los Angeles to finish the run of shows. While the Stones were one of the biggest rock acts on the planet, they sympathised with the entertainer after their audience so brutally harangued him. Interestingly, this wasn’t the only time the Stones frontman expressed his compassionate side towards the singer.

In 1995, he stuck up for Prince when everybody else had started to ridicule him. Prince had been embroiled in a bitter lawsuit with his record label and had started releasing music as the ‘Artist Formerly Known as Prince’. In the music press, he became a figure of fun, and Jagger didn’t believe this treatment of a generational talent was particularly fair.

“I think Prince is a great artist, very traditional in some ways,” he told Rolling Stone. “Prince has been overlooked. But he’s so incredibly in the mould of the James Brown sort of performer. He broke a lot of musical modes and invented a lot of styles, and couldn’t keep up with himself. Very prolific, which is rare.”

He continued: “Mostly people write three songs and repeat themselves.”

For Jagger, the musician’s ability to continually evolve past his own high watermark is what set him apart from the rest of the rock and roll set. A unique vision and a singular willingness to not compromise that vision is what has made Prince one of the most creatively edifying artists of his generation

“So Prince has a lot of talent as a writer,” Jagger claimed before highlighting perhaps Prince’s most undervalued component: his live shows. ‘The Purple One’ was able to command a stage no matter the size of the show or the esteem of the stage he shared, as perhaps best typified when he blew away some of the world’s greatest guitarists with just one solo. The Stones frontman continued: “I’ve seen great performances by Prince. He’s outperformed almost everyone. I’d rate him at the top. I don’t think there’s a lot of competition from new artists.”

It’s rare for Jagger to speak about anybody in such superlative terms, but Prince was different. Following his death in 2016, the frontman called him a “revolutionary artist” and said, “his talent was limitless”. In Jagger’s view, Prince was a one-off, and we’ll never see an all-rounder quite like him again.

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In Early Modern English, thou was the singular and you was the plural. Plural you came to be used as a polite form of address (similar to the French vous, which is also used for the plural), but over time this polite form became more and more common, eventually displacing the singular thou altogether.

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Non-IE languages often have more than two levels of distinctness. In Thai and Japanese (the only two languages about which I can speak with confidence), there are a variety of different pronouns that can be used depending on the exact nature of the social relations between the interlocutors, and the system often extends not just to the 2nd person pronoun but to the 1st and 3rd person pronouns as well.

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