Mick Jagger

Primitive Cool suffers from the same unfortunate '80s production as Jagger's first solo album, but at least "Throwaway" kicks things off with a song Stones fans can live with. And the album at times sounds like a Steel Wheels dry run. Perhaps more interesting than the record itself at this point is the highly publicized lovers' quarrel with Keith that Jagger was having at the time. The two stopped talking to each other before someone luckily realized there were still jillion-zillion-millions of dollars left to make if they jumpstarted the Stones.

With his venturesome second solo LP, Primitive Cool, Mick Jagger has finally reasserted his
voice of rage and disdain – or at least he has managed to reinvoke it as much as may be
possible for an artist so worldly and unsentimental. For more than a generation, Jagger has
peacocked his way across rock & roll bandstands, singing songs of violence, carnality,
contempt and hubris with such a convincing leer that for many of us the singer s... More >

He grooves his overpaid pickup band, he tells Jeff Beck what to do, he writes love songs for every occasion, he doesn't even over-sing much--in short, he realizes his solo move, which beats botching it if only because the sound of a plutocrat's desperation is such an awful thing. But when I realized that "Let's Work" was no metaphor--that it was the plutocrat importuning his lessers to "kill poverty" from the bootstraps up--somehow I stopped worrying whether his "life is trivialized." Your choice, mister--you live with it. (Grade: B-)