England Lost: Mick Jagger releases Brexit-inspired solo songs

From The Guardian:

Mick Jagger at 74 has delivered his first solo musical foray into political commentary, with a pair of new songs that deliver grimly mocking takes on the age of Brexit and Trump. 

The celebrated Rolling Stones frontman released England Lost and Gotta Get A Grip on Thursday, saying he wrote them while stirred by “anxiety [and] unknowability of the changing political situation”. 

The songs represent Jagger’s first solo appearance on any release since 2011 and follows last year’s Stones album, Blue & Lonesome. 

Mick Jagger wrote a 'masterpiece' memoir that has never been published Read more Both tracks feature a sardonic Jagger half-singing, half-spitting his lines in a primitive rap over programmed beats and burring, blues-rock guitar riffs. 

Jagger said in a statement he rushed to release the songs, which he began writing just a few months ago, while they still reflected the transatlantic political climate that spawned them. ‘’We obviously have a lot of problems. So am I politically optimistic? … No,” Jagger said. 

England Lost uses a disenchanted, plain-speaking football fan as the narrator for what he said was the “feeling that we are in a difficult moment in our history”.

Lyric Version 

Jagger said: “It’s obviously got a fair amount of humour because I don’t like anything too on the nose but it’s also got a sense of vulnerability of where we are as a country.” 

If the England Lost music video is anything to go by, it’s clear enough that Jagger – one of the great re-exporters of US folk music to American audiences, whose band made arguably its best album while holed up in France as tax exiles – has misgivings about a Britain turning inward. 

It features Welsh actor Luke Evans as a polite, well dressed gentleman in a cryptic scenario where he is fleeing a menacing array of compatriots who end up dragging him back from the surf as he apparently tries to swim beyond British shores. 

Gotta Get A Grip is a kaleidoscopic diatribe about a political culture led by “lunatics and clowns” who are content for a public fed “fake news” and “policy shams” to “eat shit [and] cake”. 

“Gotta keep it zipped / shoot ’em from the hip / beat ’em with a stick”, goes the modus operandi, along with an absurd journey into the modern cult of self-improvement. 

“I’ve tried diversion and I’ve tried coercion/ meditation and medication / LA culture and aquapuncture / over-eating and sex in meetings / induced insanity, Christianity / long walks and fast drives / wild clubs and low dives.” 

Jagger, the consummate businessman at the helm of the definitive music industry juggernaut for nigh-on five decades, doesn’t serve up any profound escape routes from the individualist bind at the core of neo-Liberalism, a corresponding populist lurch to the far right, or whatever else. 

He offered this take on the song’s message: “Despite all those things that are happening, you gotta get on with your own life, be yourself and attempt to create your own destiny.”