The Rolling Stones song Mick Jagger thinks no one understands: “They get it all wrong”

Most artists don’t have a choice as to what their songs really mean. While they may have written it and have their own theories about what the lyrics behind their classics mean, there’s a good chance that everyone who listens will come in with their own beliefs regarding their classic tunes. Mick Jagger has been known to be a bit cagey about a handful of Rolling Stones tracks, but he thought that ‘Beast of Burden’ had been taken out of context for years.

Before the band had gotten their second wind with Some Girls, various media outlets had already scrutinised Jagger’s lyrics. While artists like Bob Dylan were making bold declarations about the state of the world, the frontman’s descriptions of the fast times of a rock and roll star were not always the most PC way of articulating it, usually coming under fire for sounding misogynistic on tracks like ‘Stupid Girl’ and ‘Under My Thumb’.

Even though the group did have their nasty side, they always made up for it with their knack for writing love songs. Whether it was saying goodbye to a former flame on ‘Ruby Tuesday’ or talking about their own mortality on ‘Wild Horses’, Jagger let people know the shape of his heart more than a few times…only for him to throw it out the window when it came time to turn to disco.

By the time the Some Girls sessions began, Jagger had already planned a disco song that could compete with the Donna Summers of the world. While ‘Miss You’ is the kind of piece that comes off more slimy than romantic, the rest of the album is one of the most eclectic batches of tracks the band ever made.

Outside of the country-leaning ‘Far Away Eyes’ or the borderline punk brashness of ‘Respectable’, ‘Beast of Burden’ was in line with the classic Stones sound. Featuring Keith Richards’ trademark rhythm guitar playing, many of the lyrics were criticised at the time for demeaning women, implying that Jagger was talking about not needing any woman to bring him down.

When talking about the track later, Jagger explained that most of those lines were taken out of context, recalling in Classic Rock Stories, “The song says, ‘I don’t need a beast of burden, and I’m not going to be your beast of burden, either’. Any woman can see that that’s like my saying that I don’t want a woman to be on her knees for me. I get accused of being anti-girl, but people don’t really listen. They get it all wrong.”

Then again, Jagger was always going to be fighting this battle no matter what he said. Since this was the same frontman who sang songs about girls only speaking to him when they’re spoken to and pretty much every single line of ‘Brown Sugar’, the fact that they thought that this piece was just “anti-girl” would have probably been an understatement.

Still, in the context of the band’s development, this was probably the biggest growth that the group could have asked for at the time. After years of making songs that could have been considered demeaning, Jagger finally found a groove that seemed to have an equal conversation with the opposite sex.

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