In an era when social media is used to promote and exaggerate money, popularity, and status, Mick Jagger has used it to present himself as something he’s never really seemed to be: a regular guy who enjoys going for walks and visiting tourist attractions.
Jagger has been on Instagram since 2019, but his activity spiked this fall as he documented the Rolling Stones’ No Filter tour. He was standing in front of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, outside a junkyard in Nashville, and drinking a beer in a saloon in Charlotte, North Carolina, where no one seemed to recognize or care who he was. Jagger talked about his Instagram habit and how he spends his downtime when on the road in a new interview with The Washington Post.
“Each town has something of great interest, whether it’s a beautiful park, or a lovely picture, or a museum that’s interesting to you, or some odd thing that you never thought of,” Jagger said of his journeys. In the end, he said he’s just trying to “get a vibe of where the place is,” and that his understated Instagram aesthetic reflects the fact that his posts are less about vanity and more about keeping a diary of the places he’s seen.
Jagger claimed he normally travels with one security guard and may be joined by a member of the Stones’ backing band. When he is occasionally recognized while out and about, he claims that being masked throughout the pandemic has made him less so.
Jagger’s Instagram has a really normie vibe, so he offered some equal normie stories about how some of his most memorable photographs came to be. He stated some locals tipped him off about the Thirsty Beaver Saloon as he was sipping a beer in Charlotte.
Jagger also talked about a set of images he shot in Las Vegas, where he photographed himself on the famed Las Vegas strip and in the parking lot of a generic strip mall.
