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.
