How Mick Jagger’s French Literature Obsession Turned the Stones Into Existentialists

The most surprising thing about Aftermath and Between the Buttons isn’t the sitar or the music hall piano — it’s the narrator. Jagger suddenly starts sounding like a bored, cynical intellectual who’s been reading too much Camus. He was. In the mid-1960s, he devoured French novelists and existentialist philosophy, especially Flaubert, Proust, and Sartre. That detached, observational tone — a guy watching the world fall apart and just shrugging — that’s pure existentialism dropped into rock lyrics.

You hear it most on “Mother’s Little Helper” and “19th Nervous Breakdown.” Instead of “I love you, baby,” Jagger is clinically dissecting suburban pill addiction and social anxiety. On “Connection” from Between the Buttons, the narrator is just tired, waiting