Mick Jagger -- the indefatigable arch-satyr whose greatest brag isTime is on My Side -- turns 60 this week, a cultural event that has occasioned a great deal of derision, particularly among those of us who have, in fact, hoped that all of the members of that generation would die before they got old.
Central to the fast and furious ridicule is Jagger's advanced age, a subject of sarcastic scrutiny since the late 1970s, when a now-corpulent and melancholic John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) dismissed him and each of his peers as "too old."
It is tempting to mock pop's nearest Dorian Grey, to ask whether one should offer him, on this leonine day, 60 vials of Sta-Hard, 60 pulsating tweens, or 60 pairs of idiotically loose spandex pants. But it may be time to end, once and for all, our own caustic scrutiny of the voice of the "Strolling Bones" -- an epithet that has stuck to the group like a limpet since the days in which they were "almost young," to quote Leonard Cohen, an elderly minstrel who has cannily escaped such morbid scrutiny.
The age of 60, if a surprising event for a rock star, is hardly a signal for sexual decrepitude. We are all, variously, friends with, related to or, in fact, persons of that age, and would hardly dare to deem them/us to be virtual eunuchs, to be subjects of our ceaseless revulsion.
Our knowledge of this age, however, may be the rub. One expects age and grace to occur simultaneously. The thought of any of our fathers, for example -- as beautiful as they may be -- screaming "I'm so hot for you!" while writhing in codpiece-apparent pants is simply too upsetting to bear. Is this because we wish to neuter our elders? Or is it because rock music, like particularly pragmatic animal packs, seeks to thin its ranks according to brutal laws of fitness and speed?
Rock stars, unlike any other artist, perform adolescence with the virtuosity of Laurence Olivier in blackface. Like the acned ranks of middle-class boys, who retreat to their parents' basements in order to dream of a true and through life of sex, drugs, and apostatic power, rock icons live in the space between security and rebellion, in a state of perpetual abnegation of rules designed to accommodate them in the first place.
Women are keenly aware of the erotic horror that is a grown man living in his parents' basement with an electric guitar, a pile of suspiciously pungent sheets, and a nimbus of hair combed around the poignant tonsure that separates the men from the men-in-drag; that is, the men perpetually sheathed in baseball caps, regardless of their love for the field of dreams.
The Peter Pan man is not charming, and does not merit our Tinkerbellian applause. He is, in the main, static and undeveloped; more importantly, he is not Mick Jagger. The Lips Incomparable may be 60, but he is still picking up more tail than the Humane Society and, as such, has earned himself an honest place in Neverland, a region Michael Jackson has tried to inhabit.
Jagger, on the other hand, appears to be surgery-free: What else could explain his resemblance to those bizarre finger puppets from Chinatown that, when manipulated by five digits, most closely approximate His Satanic Majesty's simian face?
He is also the genuine article, realer than Real Deal Holyfield. And authenticity, in virtually every other musical case, is enough. I have seen Bob Dylan actually mumbling Ikea assembly directions through a four-watt amplifier, and have conversely witnessed the adulation of the crowd. I have seen the 90-plus-year-old, and still brilliant, Jay McShann teetering on the edge of his piano bench while the jazz crowd snapped their fingers; I have seen Etta James seduce a crowd with her swaying hips, hips the size of the Mississippi Delta. Why were none of these artists vilified for their age? When Frank Sinatra started replacing lyrics with drunken improvs ("Love was just a glance a way, a huge pair of pants away"), his family pulled the plug on his performances: I maintain that he was just getting started, and curse his handlers to this day.
Sixty: The number is only meaningful if you do not have the juice to back up the fact that you are, essentially, three red-hot 20-year-olds.
If I could wish for anything for Jagger's significant birthday, it would only be that he write the songs he wrote years ago. He could drive onstage on a Rascal with a drool cup if he was still writing the druggy bliss that is Sticky Fingers, the itchy heaven of Stray Cat Blues, the murderous joy of Paint it Black, the Paradise Regained that is Sympathy for the Devil.
When Liberace was tormented by his detractors for his ermine capes and candelabra rings, he famously complained of "crying all the way to the bank."
The Rolling Stones, carnivalesque joke or rock exemplars, have meant something to each of us: They are the gooey white centre of the Hostess Cupcake, the aching bite of the Pixie Stick, the taste of insurrection. Like their ubiquitous logo, they are the tongue and mouth -- the entire oral artifact -- of a still-new musical culture that asks us to bite into our desires and leave a scar.
"Sometimes I'm sexy, move like a stud," Jagger sings in Bitch. "Sometimes I'm so shy," he counters. Somewhere in this paradox lies the mystery of his continued appeal, his easy movement between identity and expectation.
If you are 60 and can't squeeze into tiny pants and scratch like Jagger, the onus is on you (and, eventually, on us) to make like the tough, and get going.
To the convulsive, the beautiful, the absurd Jagger: May your cake be decorated with the sepulchres of your enemies, may the candles flare like cosmic fireworks, may you continue to introduce yourself as one of our finest instances -- in the words of the Bunyan's Pilgrim -- of "life, life, eternal life!"