“Street Fighting Man” by The Rolling Stones

"Street Fighting Man" hit American shops as a single in August 1968 and only reached British ears that December, opening the second side of Beggars Banquet. Mick Jagger first wrote different words entirely, but the political violence boiling over that year pushed him to rewrite it around revolution in the streets, and he left the lyric ambiguous enough to make everybody nervous.

Keith Richards drives it on acoustic guitar and bass, Charlie Watts pounds away, and Brian Jones colors it with sitar and tambura for a raga-rock drone, with Jimmy Miller producing. It was the last Stones single Jones played on. Plenty of American stations refused to touch it and it stalled at 48 on the Hot 100, but the press cheered, and it did wonders for the band's name as cultural troublemakers.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.