The Devil's in the Details

The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" was released in 1968 on their 7th British studio album Beggars Banquet. The song was written by Mick Jagger alone, unlike most Stones songs which were written by Jagger and Keith Richards. Influences in the creation of the song included the French poet Baudelaire and The Master and Margarita, a novel by Bulgakov.  The song's rhythm is a samba rock and lyrics can be easily cast as poetry.

The song begins by presenting the listeners with the speaker of the song. His identity is not revealed explicitly until the end of the song, but it is rather easy to guess that the speak is the Devil. This specific speaker makes make the entire song much more interesting. The introduction is a good example:

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 

Here we are given a description of the Devil that doesn't really fit with his traditional image. Instead of horns and torment, he is described and an old gentleman of wealth. The only reference to his evil is the idea of stealing souls. The personification of evil gets a new look from Jagger's pen.

For the rest of the song, the Devil takes us through world history and describing his perspective of famous events. He references the crucifixion of Jesus, the 1917 Russian revolution, World War Two,
European Religious Wars, and the assassinations of the Kennedys. For each event, he implicates himself with the evil side, however in the chorus he asks a difficult question:

Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game

The first part we've already answered, and the Devil know it. The part is figuring out why he does it. A question that humans have been asking forever: Why does evil exist? The use of the word "game" is important because it refers to life itself as the Devil's game, but also refers to the religious idea of a trickster god. 

The last verse of the song offers the big twist, the volta if you will. It begins:

Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails, just call me Lucifer
Cause I'm in need of some restraint

Here the Devil argues that good and evil are a lot more similar than people think. This verse also builds on the idea that evil isn't some outside force but something that is inside all of us. The idea was first introduced in the third verse where all people are implicated in the death of the Kennedys.

Overall, the song deepens the experience of all human life through its exploration of the conflict between good and evil.