Love & Passion Quote by David Bowie

Bowie is doing that sly Bowie thing: flattering and puncturing rock myth in the same breath. On the surface, it sounds like an outrageous read of Mick Jagger - the strutting avatar of male libido - as something closer to “mom.” The shock value is the point. Bowie wants you to feel the record scratch between the industry’s official story (Jagger as eternal sex symbol) and what actually happens when a figure sticks around long enough to become infrastructure.

The intent is less about insulting Jagger than diagnosing fame’s life cycle. Sex symbols are supposed to be volatile: desire, danger, appetite. But endurance turns volatility into ritual. By the time “many people” are projecting a “mother image” onto him, Jagger has crossed from object of pursuit to source of reassurance - familiar, omnipresent, oddly comforting. Mother, here, isn’t about femininity as such; it’s about caretaking and cultural anchoring. The rebellious frontman becomes the one who’s always there, the adult in the room even when he’s still wearing sequins.

Subtextually, Bowie is also smuggling in his long-standing interest in gender performance and the slipperiness of persona. If masculinity can be staged, so can maternity; both are roles audiences cast onto bodies they don’t really know. Coming from Bowie - a peer who constantly shed skins rather than solidify into a single public “parent” - the line doubles as a warning: the audience will domesticate you if you let them. The real astonishment isn’t Jagger’s; it’s ours, realizing how quickly transgression becomes tradition.