Michela Mollia
Michela Mollia
Genres: ambient, electronic, drone
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About Michela Mollia
In the annals of Mick Jagger scholarship, one name has proved more contentious than any other. A name whose mere mention caused a ruckus that ended in several bloody noses at the Jagger Studies conference in 2009. A name which has harshed the buzz during hundreds of peyote benders, and a name that inspires passionate endorsements and equally passionate renouncements. The name? Michela Mollia. The facts themselves do not offer much to explain the fervoured argumentation which this name gives rise to. Only two songs recorded by Mollia are extant, both appear on Italian compilations of electronic music by obscure composers, both are lengthy drone pieces and both were undoubtedly recorded in the mid 1980s by Mick Jagger and released under the Mollia alias. Neither compilation received much attention in the press, and were only reviewed by a couple of specialist magazines. In none of these reviews were the Mollia tracks singled out for special attention. The controversy began with the publication of Rhiannon Lucy Coslett's paper 'Michela Mollia: The REAL Mick Jagger' in 2007. Coslett, using a dense assemblage of biographical detail, archival footage and paperwork that the man the world knew as Mick Jagger had in fact been a woman, Michela Mollia. Born in Italy, Mollia moved to London as a young girl. As a teenager she began attempting to pass as male as a way of being taken more seriously as a singer/songwriter in the rock clubs of the day. With mixed success at first, she gradually began to gain respect, eventually forming the Rolling Stones with Woody, Richards and the other guys. The Stones began to record and tour, with Mollia, under the pseudonym Mick Jagger, acting as frontperson. So convincingly was this part of the paper argued, that most Jagger scholars now accept it as fact (with Alex Petridis and John Harris as notable exceptions). Where Coslett proved less credible, though, was in the subsequent sections of the paper, which argued that at some point in the late sixties, Michela Mollia was replaced by a male doppelgänger, who took on all the attributes of Jagger and continued on with the band while she returned to Italy to live in obscurity. Coslett argued that the Mollia pieces released on those compilations were by the original Mollia/Jagger and, if subjected to the scrutiny of Coslett's hermeneutic-musical technique, could be read as a feminist critique of the Stones' subsequent work. The paper engendered a great deal of critical re-evaluation, with several schools coalescing around a variety of different positions: - Michela Mollia was the original Mick Jagger, was replaced by a man and then herself recorded the tracks that she put out under her own name in the 80s (Coslett et al) - Michela Mollia was the original Mick Jagger, was replaced by a man but it was that man who put out those tracks under the Mollia pseudonym, perhaps as a way of contacting his female counterpart, perhaps just as another iteration of the myriad of pseudonymous work he put out during this period (Jonze, MacPherson) - Michela Mollia was the original Mick Jagger and was never replaced, the rumour of the doppelgänger was put about to shore up the authenticity of the Stones. The Mollia tracks are perhaps a way of Jagger re-engaging with hir femininity (Empire, Passantino) - Michela Mollia (female) and Mick Jagger (male) are two people, both of whom have fronted the Stones under the Jagger name at various times in history (Lynskey et al) - There was no Michela Mollia, the rumour of her existence results from a confusion in an early, blurry photograph of a Stones performance in which Jagger is obscured by a female fan's body and face. The source material in Coslett's paper has been made to fit the argument, rather than the argument being created from the material (Harris, Petridis) - It is not so much a question of Mollia/Jagger, but of seeing the Stones and the subsequent Jagger side projects as part of a politico-musical assemblage in which we all take part (Heritage, Freeman, Cartner-Morley) Even within these schools there is disagreement, sniping and pedantry, but it is widely agreed that Coslett's paper constituted a reformulation of Jagger scholarship, forging new alliances and breaking down existing ones. Early in their career, a scholar's position on the Mollia question can determine which institutions they can expect to work for, which journals will publish their work, and which conferences they can speak at. Whatever the truth, it might be the case, as Suzanne Moore has argued, that the density of hermeneutic exposition, theoretical pontificating and detailed historical research may in fact serve only to obscure whether, at the first Stones session in 1962, it was a man or a woman who growled, with characteristic aplomb, "And a one, and a two and a three..."
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