The author is Marc Spitz who was originally a music journalist that later created this book about Mick Jagger’s “legacy”, so to speak. He also is the author of other books and biographies about musicians like David Bowie. He has even written for the New York Times and other prestigious journalistic sources like the magazine Spin.
Even though the book is a biography, the entire section was far from a cut-and-dry reiteration of Jagger’s life. Though, before he develops the past, he begins telling us about the present and why people should start to rethink why Mick Jagger acts the way he does. People may call him over-dramatic and stuffy but Spitz makes us reluctant to believe what is said about him by opening up a new path of discovery to why it is better for Jagger to be the way he is (rather than a “show-and-tell” rocker). After laying out this disclaimer, he explains how young Jagger, an upper-middle class teen, was prestigious in school and had a good relationship with his parents – unlike many of the world-renowned rockers. He then discusses how the band came to be and the decisions and sacrifices they all had to make in the beginning (like Mick had to drop out of college as well as drop a few band members to make the band perfect).
The context of this section/entire book would definitely be spacial. It would be spacial because a biography is a book about someone’s life – and a book about someone’s life is obviously history now. So, based on the definition of spacial – which is a piece of writing that comes from an event in history – this book is definitely about several events in history, however, all of the events are just focused on one person.
The overall (and generalized) purpose for why this was written was to get Mick Jagger’s history in writing. Whether it’s for fans or just regular people, the purpose was to get all of his past together instead of in bits-and-pieces of it in interviews, articles and videos. However, the more specified purpose would be to show that not all rockers or musicians are the same. Basically, it is telling us that we can’t judge them by a few actions because their history is what defines them, not what they do to hide it.
The audience that this book is written for would be people who love rock-and-roll or a “bluesy” type of music. More specifically, this book is for people who like the Rolling Stones as a band. The demographic of this audience is usually adults, but sometimes teens.
The most prominent rhetorical elements that I discovered throughout this section were: pathos/imagery, confirmation/refutation, diction, syntax and theses.
Pathos/imagery: This was included within the entire section. Because it is a biography, perceptibly there should be a lot of emotion. Even if an event or massive change in Jagger’s life was just touched upon, there was still an immense amount of emotion behind lying in the backgrounds of each one mentioned. Spitz brought in emotion through Mick Jagger’s actions and how he acted in the situation, in immense detail. For one event, he explained Mick Jagger’s nervousness to go onstage and he explained the emotion so densely that I could not only feel what he was feeling but see it as well.
Theses: Within this part of the book, Spitz included an abounding amount of theses and counter-arguments about Jagger. He explained how people called him “Brenda Jagger” (which is a demeaning name for “snobby”) and how (refuting this claim) people should rethink who Jagger really is. Also, he mentioned a claim about how some people believe that Jagger’s solo record was terrible, even though he has the “temptation to defend Mick” because Mick did not do that for himself. (Refuting goes with theses).
Confirmation/refutation: In this section, there were two elements of the Classical Argument Structure included. The confirmation was assumed through all of the facts that he added and the refutation was an aside that was built-in (and expected) after every new thesis he introduced. At one point Spitz even said, “there is a temptation to defend mick (as I just did)…” and clearly put it out there that he was refuting a certain thesis provided beforehand.
Diction: Unexpectedly, in this section, I discovered that I didn’t know some of the diction used because it was very high-end and developed.
Syntax: the sentence structure was extremely elongated and hard to understand at times. After reading for a while, I started to get used to this structure but, at first, it was hard to discern what Spitz was trying to put out to his audience.
Yes, I believe that the author completely accomplished their purpose. They did because the purpose, as stated before, was just to get a good background on whom Mick Jagger really is and why we should rethink our judgments against him. While reading this story, I not only learned to reevaluate who he is, but I also learned (which was another one of the author’s purposes) some valid information in the history and making of the Rolling Stones.
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