According to online dictionaries, take to the streets and take it to the street are idiomatic. As defined in the Free Dictionary, Take it to the street:
to tell everyone about your problems.
Strangely enough, the Free Dictionary doesn't have an entry for take to the streets, because I find this phrase more commonly used. To borrow Wiktionary's definition, take to the streets means
(of a crowd of people) To gather together in the public streets of a town or city to show communal solidarity in either celebration or opposition.
Their meanings seem to differ. But I am curious how much do they overlap in everyday writing, if at all? Namely, do people use one when they intend for the other and have their writing considered acceptable?
Take (takin') it to the streets, on the other hand, is the title of several different songs/albums by a number of musicians (The Doobie Brothers, Curtis Mayfield, and Rampage, among others.)
What was this phrase intended to mean by those musicians, take to the streets, or take it to the street, or something totally different?
Best Answer
"To take to the streets" is actually a relatively common recent idiom that means, depending on context, to publicly protest, to riot, or to rebel.
Examples:
We can only assume that "takin' it to the streets" has a related meaning, but what exactly the Doobie Brothers meant is a matter of opinion. The lyrics certainly sound like a call to protest:
where "it" refers to whatever they were protesting against. However, it may have other meanings that are not immediately obvious.