Before the band had gotten their second wind with Some Girls, various media outlets had already scrutinised Jagger’s lyrics, coming under fire for sounding misogynistic on tracks like ‘Stupid Girl’ and ‘Under My Thumb’.
Keith RIchards: 'Songs like Beast of Burden happen once every 10 years'“I didn’t write it as a special song or [think] it was a special song when I recorded it, but it’s grown on me over the years, and I realized why people respond to it so much.” The song has become somewhat of a standard that Richards holds himself to when writing new music. He expressed his desire to repeat the song’s success, saying: “I wish I could write another one just as good, you know? That’s my aim. But it’s a beautiful song. It just has all of the feel, and, you know, what I aim for is to write great soul ballads. And that’s getting close. Those who say it’s about one woman in particular, they’ve got it all wrong,” he explained.
By the time the Some Girls sessions began, Jagger had already planned a disco song that could compete with the Donna Summers of the world. While ‘Miss You’ is the kind of piece that comes off more slimy than romantic, the rest of the album is one of the most eclectic batches of tracks the band ever made.
‘Beast of Burden’ was in line with the classic Stones sound. Featuring Keith Richards’ trademark rhythm guitar playing, many of the lyrics were criticised at the time for demeaning women, implying that Jagger was talking about not needing any woman to bring him down.
When talking about the track later, Jagger explained that most of those lines were taken out of context, recalling in Classic Rock Stories, “The song says, ‘I don’t need a beast of burden, and I’m not going to be your beast of burden, either’. Any woman can see that that’s like my saying that I don’t want a woman to be on her knees for me. I get accused of being anti-girl, but people don’t really listen. They get it all wrong.”
Then again, Jagger was always going to be fighting this battle no matter what he said. Since this was the same frontman who sang songs about girls only speaking to him when they’re spoken to and pretty much every single line of ‘Brown Sugar’, the fact that they thought that this piece was just “anti-girl” would have probably been an understatement.