The two men credited with writing this song disagree about what it means, in public, on the record, for decades. One says it is an apology between bandmates. The other says that is rubbish.
Here is what a beast of burden is, what each of them has claimed, and why the disagreement is the most interesting thing about it.
The Short Answer
Refusing to carry someone. A beast of burden is a working animal, an ox or a mule, kept to haul weight for somebody else. The narrator says he will not be one, then spends the rest of the song asking whether he is tall enough, rough enough, rich enough, which undercuts the refusal completely. It is a man declaring independence and asking for reassurance in the same breath.
The Story Behind the Song
The Rolling Stones recorded Some Girls at Pathe Marconi Studios in Paris between 10 October and 21 December 1977, producing it themselves as the Glimmer Twins. The album came out on 9 June 1978 and this was its second American single, released on 28 August with “When the Whip Comes Down” on the reverse.
The band were in trouble. Keith Richards was facing drug charges in Toronto that carried the possibility of a long prison sentence, punk and disco had made them look like an artefact, and it was the first album with Ronnie Wood as a full member after Mick Taylor’s departure.
Richards brought the music, the title and the idea. Jagger wrote most of the verses, improvising a large number of them in the studio to fit the guitars. Richards’ description of the process is that he handed it over and told Jagger to run away and fill it in.
What does Keith Richards say it is about?
Gratitude, and something close to an apology. He said in 2003 that when he came back to the band after what he called closing down the laboratory, meaning his years of addiction, he went into the studio with Jagger to thank him for shouldering the burden, and that in retrospect this is why he wrote the song for him.
He expanded on it later. His account is that he was trying to say sorry for having passed the weight of running the band across, and to propose sharing the power and the load again now that he was back.
He has also been direct about the romantic reading. Speaking to Harper’s Bazaar in 2017 he said that people who think it is about one woman in particular have got it all wrong.
What does Mick Jagger say?
That none of that is true. Asked about the allegorical interpretation he laughed it off, saying he thought it was made up, and that it was rubbish.
His own account of writing it is deflating on purpose. In the liner notes to the 1993 compilation Jump Back he said the lyric was not particularly heartfelt in a personal way, described it as a soul-begging song and an attitude song, and explained it as a technical exercise: one melodic lick, broken down and worked up, with two parts that are essentially the same.
Who is right?
Both can be, and that is the point. Richards wrote the music and the title with an intention. Jagger wrote most of the words at a microphone in Paris without that intention, because Richards did not explain it to him.
A song can carry a meaning its lyricist did not put there. Richards even qualified his own claim with the phrase in retrospect, which suggests he worked out what he had been doing some time after doing it.
Why does it sound like that?
Because of the guitar weaving. Richards and Wood do not divide into lead and rhythm. Both play fluid, rolling figures, slipping over and under each other, one high while the other is low, with no solo section at all.
That approach is the reason Some Girls sounds alive rather than assembled, and this is the clearest example of it on the record. Richards has said that after all the fast numbers on the album, everybody settled down and enjoyed playing the slow one.
How did it do?
It reached number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 and became a permanent fixture of the band’s live set. Rolling Stone placed it at 435 on its 2004 list of the greatest songs of all time.
Some Girls was received as a return to form, widely described as the band’s strongest record since Exile on Main St. Two months after the single came out, Richards’ Toronto case concluded: he was found guilty, the charges were reduced, and he was spared prison.
What is the famous mishearing?
A large number of people hear the title line as a complaint about pizza burning. It is not, and once you have heard the wrong version it is difficult to hear anything else.
That is a common fate for a phrase sung loosely over a lazy groove, and it has done the song no harm at all.
Why it lasted
Because the contradiction inside it is honest. A man announcing he will not be used, while listing the ways he is worried he does not measure up, is a more accurate picture of pride than a straightforward rejection would be.
Whether that man is talking to a woman or to his songwriting partner is a question the two people who wrote it have never managed to settle between them.
Loosely sung choruses over a slow groove produce more misheard lyrics than any other kind of record; when that is why you cannot find a song, our song lyrics search will name it.