Why the Rolling Stones Got Political on ‘Beggars Banquet’ and ‘Let It Bleed’ — and Which Songs Tackled Class, War, and Vietnam

By 1968, the Rolling Stones couldn’t ignore the chaos around them. Civil rights marches, anti-war protests, the May ’68 uprising in Paris — it all seeped into the songwriting. Jagger and Richards stopped writing “Satisfaction”-style complaints and started aiming outward. The shift wasn’t a calculated move; it was a reaction. The band’s own run-ins with the law (Jagger’s drug bust) and the general sense that the world was burning made political lyrics feel inevitable.

“Street Fighting Man” is the most direct class-war song they ever wrote — Jagger cribbed the title from a Chicago anarchist and the lyrics describe a man who wants to fight but is stuck in a “sleepy London town.”