Sympathy for the Devil’s lyrics focus on atrocities in the history of mankind from Lucifer’s point of view, including the trial and death of Jesus Christ (“Made damn sure that Pilate washed his hands and sealed his fate”), European wars of religion (“I watched with glee while your kings and queens fought for ten decades for the Gods they made”), the violence of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the 1918 massacre of the Romanov family (“I stuck around St. Petersburg when I saw it was a time for a change/Killed the Tsar and his ministers/Anastasia screamed in vain”), and World War II (“I rode a tank, held a general’s rank when the blitzkrieg raged, and the bodies stank”). The song goes right to the present time of 1968 with the lines: “I shouted out, ‘Who Killed the Kennedys?’/When after all it was you and me”. Rolling Stone magazine placed it at No. 32 in their list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. x
Just another WordPress site