I am really late to this party re V/M's SD. But as a literature nerd myself I have to say that I am a little confused about how "Sympathy for the Devil" could be construed as actually Satanic. In my own personal opinion it's a song about the danger of the appeal of "the devil" (which in this day and age, as in the day and age the Stones wrote it, could mean almost any tempting ultimate evil.) And that's a complicated, emotion-inducing aspect of being a human being that MANY great authors, with many different agendas, from Milton on, tapped into.
Well, if you accept that Paradise Lost is Christian Literature- which is what it is- why can't you accept that there is also Satanic Literature. People can write their theories of x,y and z, about the song being ironic, and it being about this that and the other, but none of this is textually supported. Beyond which, the reading of a sixties work as being of the level of a postmodern meme, isn't an interpretation of that time: people didn't do peace and love and be hippies ironically: it wasn't something they did as a look for an instagram picture. And the turning nasty of that period of "peace and love", which included dabbling in the occult and the taking of psychedelic drugs in order to access the other, later manifested itself in much darker practices, one that I will not mention, the extremely ongoing (for the next decade plus) practices of the Manson family, and the notorious festival at Altamont.
it has for example been confirmed that in American Pie, when Don McClean wrote these lyrics, he was talking about that festival:
"So come on Jack be nimble, Jack be quick
Jack Flash sat on a candlestick
'Cause fire is the devil's only friend
Oh and as I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage
No angel born in Hell
Could break that Satan's spell
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died
He was singing'
This was the festival where a few songs after the performance of Sympathy for the Devil, a member of audience was stabbed and beaten to death by the Hells Angels hired by The Rolling Stones (not an ironic name) security, albeit in what looks like to have had some degree of self-defence, but also that of unmitigated violence. American Pie was written in 1972: it is an interpretation of that event at that particular time, and it is clear that that death and the particular energy that was being invoked via performance at that time was seen by a contemporary as satanic. The festival at Altamont is commonly cited as the end to the era of peace and love.
You are also welcome to watch the video Invocation of My Demon Brother (you haven't said if you watched it), in which Jagger appears and created the soundtrack. That is a film designed to invoke satanic energy. Jagger was also supposed to have been in another of Anger's films- Lucifer Rising- but was in the end replaced by his brother (although Marianne Faithfull did still appear), but is supposed to have eventually turned down the part after what happened at Altamont, and his no longer being able to have such associations, such as Anton Lavey, Anger and that whole Satan by the sea scene.
And if you actually breakdown the text of Sympathy for the Devil, you have the devil boasting of his deeds, while people woo-hoo in the background, all the while telling the audience that they know his name. And that is all that is there is. Any other interpretation is not textually based. And the actual structure of the piece is invocatory:the devil is telling us, as his audience, that we know his name: that we have him within us (and this is song written a time when people's heads were fried in acid, so the susceptibility of the audience was at its greatest). And that is why Don Mclean as a contemporary saw the Altamont Free Festival as having become a satanic rite, because of the way that song is written, and the reaction and actions of those attendant. People can draw comparisons between this song and proto-novels such as Paradise Lost, which are third person works of great structure, and obviously based in a Christian tradition, but Sympathy for the Devil isn't written in the third person, and doesn't have within it any form of Christianising structure. There are lots of works that have the devil depicted within them, and I am not in anyway arguing that the depiction of the devil makes a work Satanic. For example, Hotel California mentions the beast and describes what sounds like Satanic Ritual, and has been interpreted as being a depiction of the Church of Satan run by Lavey. Which is all fine, but the work is differently written, and you cannot argue that there is an invocatory aspect, or that it is a piece of Satanic Literature. Santana (who Virtue and Moir are also dancing too) claims that his music is given to him by an archangel Metatron, which some fundamentalists name as a daemon. But again, there is nothing in his work that i have heard, in terms of lyrical or musical form that means that I would label that Satanic. And as really these three co-contemporary works or artists that Virtue and Moir have chosen to skate to illustrate, there was a hell (pun) of a lot of this sort of thing going on in a completely non-ironic way at the time that Sympathy for Devil was written. And if I were to cite a more classical Literary reference (and a better one that Paradise Lost for a counter argument), I would cite William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which places value on satanic energy but does so in way that is within a structure for good: William Blake also made the famous quote about Milton really being of the devil's party.
I don't think Virtue and Moir are skating to this song to turn the Olympics into a Satanic rite, because I don't think that in general music choice and choreography in figure skating has any great depth to it. But at the same time, I would not be skating to that song.........: taking one's first steps on to the ice at the Olympics whilst the devil's voice filters through the stadium (if they are using a lyricked version) telling everyone they know his name. Not for me. And as Jagger said at Altamont: "We're always having—something very funny happens when we start that number."
