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JAGGER: You realize that these girls are going, either quietly or loudly, sort of crazy. And you’re going, “Well, this is good. You know, this is something else.” At that age you’re just so impressed, especially if you’ve been rather shy before. There’s two parts of all this, at least. There’s this great fascination for music and this love of playing blues—not only blues, just rock’n’roll generally. There’s this great love of that. But there’s this other thing that’s performing….

When Wenner asked how Jagger came to be such a performer, he answered:

I didn’t have any inhibitions. I saw Elvis and Gene Vincent, and I thought, “Well, I can do this.” And I liked doing it. It’s a real buzz, even in front of twenty people, to make a complete fool of yourself. But people seemed to like it. And the thing is, if people started throwing tomatoes at me, I wouldn’t have gone on with it. But they all liked it, and it always seemed to be a success, and people were shocked. I could see it in their faces.10

Since the late 1960s, when his mature style of performing took shape, Jagger’s reputation as an actor, for becoming a different person on stage, is unequaled. Truman Capote described him as “one of the most total actors I’ve ever seen. He has this remarkable ability to be absolutely totally extroverted.”11

Perhaps the most vivid illustration of the two Jaggers is in the documentary Gimme Shelter. We see the classic Jagger strutting and dancing onstage, but behind the scenes, as Jonathan Vogel puts it, “he frequently reins in and manages his image in an almost workmanlike manner offstage.”12 When Meredith Hunter was knifed by Hell’s Angels—the moment when, according to Don McLean, Jagger was onstage laughing diabolically at all the mayhem—we can see that Jagger had actually taken a more business-like tone as he repeatedly tried to calm the crowd (“Whose war are we fighting, people?”). When Jagger and Charlie Watts are first shown the frame-by-frame footage that revealed Hunter brandishing a gun just before being set upon, there is no face in the room more focused, concerned, and dismayed than Jagger’s.

A Little Help from Nietzsche

Nietzsche ideas about life and art help make sense of the relationship between these two Jaggers. As a philosopher, Nietzsche believed in the centrality not of ideas, but of life itself and the importance of vitality, strength, and power. He is not unlike the popular author Ayn Rand (whom our colleague Gordon Marino describes as “Nietzsche without the fun”) in valorizing the strong and showing little empathy for weakness. Jagger does not seem to us to be very Nietzschian or Randian in contempt for the weak and slavish (we do not think that Nietzsche and Rand would join Richards and Jagger in the uncharacteristically quasi-Christian song “The Salt of the Earth”). But the two Jaggers can be seen as an illustration or application of Nietzsche’s idea that the meaning of art is life itself.

In The Twilight of the Idols he asks:

what does all art do? does it not praise? does it not glorify? does it not select? does it not highlight? By doing all this it strengthens or weakens certain valuations…. Is this no more than an incidental? an accident? Something in which the instinct of the artist has no part whatever? Or is it not rather the prerequisite for the artist’s being an artist at all … ? Is his basic instinct directed towards art, or is it not rather directed towards the meaning of art, which is life?13

Could the meaning of art really be life itself? Nietzsche would say that what Mick Jagger has become is praiseworthy. Adding more aesthetic appeal to your own life is the best kind of artistic creation because it invents something new and beautiful, and covers up any ugliness that is ordinarily present.

But more than beauty is at stake in Nietzsche’s reasoning. Unlike many philosophers who take the purpose and highest goal of life to be understanding, Nietzsche belittled understanding when it