The Rolling Stones -- "Street Fighting Man"
This song inevitably seems to me like an invitation to enter the heart of darkness. I can't hear this track without thinking of the passage from Michael Herr's Dispatches in which Herr recounts a conversation he had in Vietnam with a US Marine machine-gunner who said he couldn't wait to get to Hue so he could blast this song from the tape deck strapped to his back while he simultaneously blasted his way through the rubble of the devastated city with his machine-gun.
Of course, this may have been intended as an anti-war song, and the "street fighting" referred to might be well-intentioned democratic protest, but the heart of darkness seems more like the Stones' natural groove. There are different ways to get to that dark place, and the careless hedonism of their music must surely be one. For all that, this is simply a great song, with a distorted acoustic guitar driving it along and sitar and tamboura filling out the sound. Jaggers' voice doesn't sound peaceful, though, and the acoustic nature of the song can't disguise the fact that, whatever the band's intentions, this song is a fighting song.
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