Like a dormant, potent volcano, arghablog rumbles. Dammit. I’m listening to the Kinks over and over again, like I’m sixteen again. When I was in high school I thought they sang just to me, so astute was Ray Davies’ insight into my engine. Now I’m graying and fatting, I’m saddled with responsibilities and wrinkled dreams, I’m becoming a character in one of his songs. If that’s what it takes, then okay. I believe – and this bold – that I have a greater capacity than other people to love the Kinks. Quality love, the kind you really have to pay for. I’ve got it, it’s right here.
Anyway I listen to Arthur and then Village Green, but more Arthur, lots and lots now. It started when I tried to get into Muswell Hillbillies, feeling like perhaps I had done it some sort of injustice over the years. But then I just got tired of it – it’s still boring all these years later – and threw on Victoria, which is one of the three or four best pop songs ever written. Then I let the iPod run on, playing through this glorious wreck of brilliance – Arthur – that I suddenly realized I have grossly, horrifically even, neglected. Odd that I would do that to an album sandwiched, chronologically, between two of my absolute favorites, The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, and the obscenely underrated Lola vs. Powerman and Moneygoround. But I did it, and now in all my geriatric splendor I’m rediscovering a messy masterpiece that landed just a scant year before I did.
So I’m hatching this massive arghablog post, as if anyone still cares, about just this. It’ll be my magnum opus, masterpiece shingle, as Hume or Boretz might have once said, and wouldn’t it be ironic if it were just as ignored as Village Green – that poor album with the misfortune to be released on the same day as the White Album, which sold many millions more copies.
The nutshell is this – and I might as well offer it up seeing as I find it hard these days to follow through on all my monstrous goals. Arthur, (or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) is Davies’ quirky response to the abysmal commercial failure of Village Green. It’s a bizarre response. Village Green failed, the conventional wisdom goes, because it was thoroughly out of step with its time. While others were singing about the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Davies once quipped, the Kinks were commemorating witches and old photo albums, pining for the fading into memory of the Victorian English way. So Arthur is Davies following every impulse all at once: the impulse to atone for his creative breakthrough/commercial catastrophe by catching up with the times; the impulse to just continue being himself, the quintessential not-like-everybody-else celebrating the England of 80 or 100 years ago; and the impulse to absorb and synthesize every significant motion in latter-60s rock all at once.
After Village Green, an album that so thoroughly came from Pluto, Ray went on to issue a timepiece, a memento of his age. Arthur is remarkably derivative in spots, an exercise in role-playing. There are snatches of Rubber Soul, Pet Sounds, Pepper, Beggar’s Banquet, as well as scads of nameless 60s psychedelic protest-jam-cock rock. Ray’s brother Dave spins in circles channeling alternately – and rather convincingly – the guitar work of mid-sixties George Harrison and later sixties Keith Richards. It’s an album that, essentially, shouldn’t be any good. A footnote the likes of Their Satanic Magesty’s Request, a work darkened by the towering shadows of those whose paths it follows.
You see – I just wanted to give a taste and get to bed, but darn if this isn’t going to eat me. The only thing more to say is that the album, instead of being a colossal non-item, is a staggering work of messy, derivative genius. The fact is that Ray not being Ray – and he sometimes IS Ray (no-one else on the planet could ever have written Victoria), is STILL a seismic force, especially in the last year of the 60s.
“Some Mother’s Son,” the single example I have time for now, is a blatant war protest song, not generally the Kinks’ flavor. From the start it sounds uncomfortably like someone else’s cause, or dare I cynically say an instance of Ray hopping on a trend. Be that as it may, though, it emerges as devastating – a gentle English ditty in saccharine tones that builds and builds, gradually and vividly depicting a gruesome battlefield death and the empty, officious rituals which surround it ["back home they put his picture in a frame; but all dead soldiers look the same"]. Though Ray seems somehow uncomfortable in this mask, his song is nonetheless better than anyone else’s on the topic. By the end you simply must forgive him his trespasses and love him (as only I truly can).
I have to sleep. It’s a rough draft and a first thought, but I might as well think out loud, as I encourage my students to do. Think out loud, you might not get the chance to say something fully thunk.
