Who's The Real Devil Here?

The Rolling Stones' song "Sympathy for the Devil," off of their album Beggars Banquet, is arguably one of the most perfect songs for an assignment like this one. Musically, it is incredibly catchy and enjoyable, but at the same time, even if read aloud as a poem, "Sympathy" comes out solid and almost a little cryptic.

The song is in first person view from Satan himself. While early rock music was often called "the devil's music," as the instruments created aggressive sounds that were uncommon before, that is not the reason Sympathy was written. Rather, it seems to simply critique mankind for the evil it has seen over the years.

First, the song starts with an introduction...:

Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul and faith

The Rolling Stones' made an interesting choice here: they took the personification of evil (the Devil), and they made him completely human. They even characterize him as someone who has "taste"! The beauty of this is that since this introduction takes us off guard, we cannot immediately tell that the Devil is speaking. That mystery is carried on throughout the poem, with Jagger only revealing his identity in the last verse.

I shouted out, "Who killed the Kennedys?"
When after all, it was you and me

The establishment of the Devil as a human sets the scene for a surprising comparison: humans and the Devil are on the same level! This camaraderie to means that there is evil inside everyone, and that perhaps the blame that people place on things like chance and religion when horrible things happen is misplaced.

After this, a bit of wordplay:

Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails

This phrase is obviously referencing coins, and therefore the idiom "there are two sides to every story," as a coin has two sides as well! The duality of all people opens the ultimate door to sympathy for the devil: evil is truly within everyone, as shown by the comparisons before that line.

It all leads up to the ultimate, slightly hidden message of the song: people must stop placing blame on external things for 100% of the bad that happens to them.