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Sir Mick???!!!
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How could this have happened, asks MUKUND PADMANABHAN.
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Incredulous ... A rebel who is now `respectable'.
I READ the news about Mick Jagger's knighthood with a mixture of amusement and incredulity. I expect large numbers of thirty and forty somethings did the same.
Sir Mick???!!! Could they really be serious? I mean, wasn't this the man who inspired the line, "Would you let your daughter go out with a Rolling Stone?" The eternal malcontent whose rubber-lips wrapped lasciviously around the microphone as he expressed sympathy for the devil, groaned about the lack of satisfaction and declared his need for someone to cream on.
Jagger made The Beatles seem naughty (but essentially nice) and Elvis seem like a pillar of respectability. Heretic, iconoclast, troublemaker — Mick was rock's "baddest" boy. The kind of person who confirmed your parents' worst fears that rock was not merely a musical genre but a cover to peddle sex, drugs and all manner of depravity.
Jagger joins about a thousand others (playwrights, teachers, community leaders and other worthies) in the British Government prepared honours list. A little later, he will stand beside them (in a dark suit or perhaps a tux) at Buckingham Palace to be anointed by the Queen.
How could this have happened? The immediate, but far from complete, answer of course is Tony Blair. The British Prime Minister, who seems to make a fetish of showing that power is not incompatible with panache, is (or so his spokesman says) a Stones fan. So Jagger's knighthood could be another stab at showing that Britannia IS Cool.
But surely, as a friend suggested, it also has to do with changing standards — a process which renders yesterday's shocker into today's non-event. A process which, by the time the cynical and weary 1990s came around, had transformed Jagger from exceptional to everyday.
This happens everywhere. The appropriate analogy in say ... tennis ... would be rising hemlines. Eighty years ago, the sight of Suzanne Lenglen's ankles (revealed by her daring mid-calf skirt) scandalised the world; today you can feast on the entire length of the sultry Anna Kournikava's lovely legs without a trace of self-consciousness.
Changing standards may apply for everyone, but it is a worrying thought. In my mind, Jagger's knighthood raised distressing visions of someone such as Eminem — that foul-mouthed, homophobic, misogynistic and possibly overrated rapper — being in line for the same honour some two decades later.
Who knows by then he could be balding, dressed in an Armani suit, sport a simpering girlfriend on his arm, be an active member of Greenpeace and acquire a peachy reputation for his generous contributions to charity. A Buckingham Palace official may discreetly reveal to the press that King William really grooved to his music while growing up as a young prince.
Of course, this will never happen, Eminem being American and therefore ineligible. But you do get the picture, yes?
It affords a glimpse of why Jagger's knighthood agitates a much larger question. Do rebels who test the limits of decency and good taste in their time inevitably go on to become respectable? Even Members of the Establishment? Possibly.
Longevity and success seem to play a huge role in the process of acceptance and cooption. Even as she approaches middle age, Madonna is already the subject of cute profiles which probe her unconventional past in a jokey and amiable manner.
Rebels, irrespective of what they do, fade with age. There will always be something incurably romantic and revolutionary about Che Guevera because he died young. Growing old however has done little for Fidel Castro who, with each passing year, appears more and more like a settled autocrat — a fully paid up member of a sad and suppressive Cuban establishment.
Still, I wouldn't have believed it of Jagger. Many hours of my misspent youth were consumed listening to the Stones — particularly "Let It Bleed" and "Beggars Banquet", arguably their most creative albums, rhythm n' blues at its very best.
If someone had told me then that Mick Jagger would bag himself a knighthood for popular music and that he would go on to describe the award as a "great honour", I would have laughed in his face.
Apparently, I didn't realise what I should have in those days. That there is no such thing as the eternal rebel. That the cliche is also an oxymoron.
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