During a 1995 interview with Rolling Stone, Jagger said:
"Well, it's a very rough, very violent era. The Vietnam War. Violence on the screens, pillage and burning. And Vietnam was not war as we knew it in the conventional sense. The thing about Vietnam was that it wasn't like World War II, and it wasn't like Korea, and it wasn't like the Gulf War. It was a real nasty war, and people didn't like it. People objected, and people didn't want to fight it..." As for the song itself, he concluded, "That's a kind of end-of-the-world song, really. It's apocalypse; the whole record's like that."[1]
In 2004, the song was ranked #38 on "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list by Rolling Stone.[2] It has also been ranked at #12 on "The 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s" list by Pitchfork Media.[3]