Sympathy for the Devil (Motörhead) cover

"Sympathy for the Devil" is a song by English rock band The Rolling Stones. The song was written by Mick Jagger and credited to the Jagger–Richards partnership. It is the opening track on the band's 1968 album Beggars Banquet. The song has received critical acclaim and features on Rolling Stone magazine's "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list, being ranked number 106 in the 2021 edition.

"Sympathy for the Devil" is credited to Jagger and Richards, though the song was largely a Jagger composition. The working title of the song was "The Devil Is My Name", having earlier been called "Fallen Angels". Jagger sings in first person narrative as the Devil, who boasts of his role in each of several historical atrocities and repeatedly asks the listener to "guess my name". The singer demands the listener's courtesy towards him, implicitly chastising the listeners for their collective culpability in the listed killings and crimes. In the 2012 documentary Crossfire Hurricane, Jagger stated that his influence for the song came from Baudelaire and from the Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita (which had just appeared in English translation in 1967). The book was given to Jagger by Marianne Faithfull and she confirmed the inspiration in an interview with Sylvie Simmons for the magazine Mojo in 2005.

Mick Jagger visited Salvador, Bahia, in 1968, where he encountered the traditions of Candomblé and found inspiration, along with Rio de Janeiro, for the song "Sympathy for the Devil". He also visited the hippie village of Arembepe in Bahia, where he was photographed playing a drum. His experiences in Bahia, with its folklore and local culture, were fundamental to the creation of the song, which he described as having a samba-like rhythm and rhythmic structure.

In a 1995 interview with Rolling Stone, Jagger said, "that was taken from an old idea of Baudelaire's, I think, but I could be wrong. Sometimes when I look at my Baudelaire books, I can't see it in there. But it was an idea I got from French writing. And I just took a couple of lines and expanded on it. I wrote it as sort of like a Bob Dylan song." It was Keith Richards who suggested changing the tempo and using additional percussion, turning the folk song into a samba.

Jagger stated in the Rolling Stone interview: "it's a very long historical figure – the figures of evil and figures of good – so it is a tremendously long trail he's made as personified in this piece." By the time Beggars Banquet was released, the Rolling Stones had already caused controversy for sexually forward lyrics such as "Let's Spend the Night Together" and their cover of the Willie Dixon's blues "I Just Want to Make Love to You". There were also claims they had dabbled in Satanism (their previous album, while containing no direct Satanic references in its music or lyrics, was titled Their Satanic Majesties Request). "Sympathy" brought these concerns to the fore, provoking media rumours and fears among some religious groups that the Stones were devil worshippers and a corrupting influence on youth.

The lyrics focus on atrocities in human history from Satan's point of view, including the trial and death of Jesus Christ, The Hundred Years' War, (though the line in question may also refer to European wars of religion) the violence of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the 1918 execution of the Romanov family during World War I, and World War II. The song was originally written with a line asking who shot John F. Kennedy, but after Robert F. Kennedy's assassination on 5 June 1968, the line was changed to reference both assassinations.

This cover is the Motörhead version from their twenty-second studio album Bad Magic released in 2015.

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