Comments on: Question About The Forthcoming Kinks Book

By: Marc Burkhardt

Marc Burkhardt — Mon, 14 May 2012 05:25:14 +0000

Wow … rally late on this. Like some of your other readers, I’m pretty cash poor but once I get a bit more scratch I definitely plan on buying your Monkees book and would happily buy any Kinks book as well. I’d be interested in your views of the RCA output which is EXTREMELY dodgy after Everyone’s In Show-Biz (Kinda like Soap Opera, though), but it’s probably best to leave out the Arista Years. I do like Give The People What They Want for nostalgic reasons, but I think there’s more chaff than wheat on Sleepwalker, Misfits, Low Budget et. al.

Anyway, hope you’re feeling well.

By: Scott

Scott — Fri, 11 May 2012 21:08:31 +0000

I agree with Greg. Schoolboys has that delightfully nostalgic song “Schooldays”. Soap Opera has the clever environmental song “Under the Neon Sign”. Everybody’s in showbiz is full of great new songs on the studio A side. I think when Ray started again with Arista, he hit two home runs in a row with Sleepwalker and Misfits. They’re not in the same vein as the earlier 60′s Kink’s hits, but they are oh so clever in the way Ray writes some of the best songs ever. Sleepwalker has that beautiful song “Full Moon”. And “Brother” is a wonderfully sweet song.

By: Greg

Greg — Fri, 04 May 2012 08:46:52 +0000

I defy anyone to re-examine an album like Schoolboys in Disgrace and not find a great appreciation to the witty, whimsical and nostalgic rememberance of our schooldays, plus it has great rock music…songs from the later period that rank up with thier “classics”: Live Life, Scattered, Around the Dial, Aggravation, The Road, Yo-Yo, Life on the Road, Life Goes On, Superman, and the three song sequence on Soap Opera, Rush Hour Blues/9 to 5/When Work is over, which Ray brilliantly chronicles so many of the working stiff charachteristics…give it another listen with an open mind!

By: Duncan A W Smith

Duncan A W Smith — Fri, 04 May 2012 02:20:36 +0000

“…prejudiced against a group who don’t face a huge amount of discrimination”. Au contraire! All the studies show that height has a enormous bearing on relative prosperity, marriage prospects and career advancement. And not just for men: just ask any woman! And if as a man you protest too much, you get hit with the “Napoleon complex” bollocks–as if there aren’t any tall megalomaniacs! De Gaulle, Bin Laden, King Zog of Albania…? But, like the Scots perhaps, it seems short people are the last group it’s still fair game to abuse with impunity. So I’m still kind of mad at Randy–why couldn’t he have picked on the bald, say!

By: Andrew Hickey

Andrew Hickey — Thu, 03 May 2012 20:23:03 +0000

Fair enough — and you’re absolutely right, of course. I wasn’t thinking particularly straight about Newman. I think in *this particular instance*, though, given the insensitivity Davies has shown to racial issues in the past (though never otherwise outright racism), the time the song was written (the late 70s, when racism was comparatively socially acceptable), other songs Davies wrote around that time (Prince Of The Punks being a rather nastily homophobic attack on Tom Robinson) and the song as a whole (with its repeated lines about “everybody has a right to their opinons, so don’t shoot me for mine”), that my reading of the song is the correct one.

I certainly hope I’ve not appeared dismissive of others’ arguments here — if anything I’ve tried to err on the other side, because thinking that a songwriter I generally admire could make such an horrific misstep is not something I’m keen on — but I honestly don’t think their readings are supported by the text, or by the context in which the song was written. (I may have sounded snippy because I spent a huge amount of time dealing with those comments, none of which had any real bearing on the substance of the post — had they been on an entry which was actually about that song I’d probably have been lesss brusque — but I’ve certainly tried to deal with everyone fairly).

By: Gary

Gary — Thu, 03 May 2012 15:03:46 +0000

Certainly would need a massive tome!!! Agree with all your comments. The band of the early 80′s – mid 90′s is a million miles away from the social commentators of the 60′s. Part of their appeal is that they are so difficult to pigeon-hole either in print or on record. Ultimately in this day and age how ‘meaningful’ is any appraisal?? Other than Kinks fans (and even then, written appeal is limited), who would care?

By: arkhonia

arkhonia — Thu, 03 May 2012 13:05:34 +0000

But Short People is actually a pretty anomalous Randy song – you mentioned Sail Away, there’s Roll With The Punches, many others…and, in relation to another type of prejudice, there’s You Can Leave Your Hat On, which is from a pretty scary point of view, offered without commentary – and has been appropriated by Tom Jones et al as some kind of ‘sexy’ come on, when it’s really some poor woman trapped in a psychopath’s flat under a bright light, shaking her tits. My point (if I had one) was more to consider that your own perceptions of a song *may* not concur with other people’s hearing of same (think this is the opposition you’re receiving here), and that it might be useful for you to maybe interrogate your own perceptions, rather than assume that anyone who disagrees with you is, in essence, wrong.

By: Andrew Hickey

Andrew Hickey — Thu, 03 May 2012 09:54:56 +0000

True. Revise that to “no-one with the slightest sense could…”
I do think there’s a huge difference, though, between a song that satirises bigotry by having the bigot be prejudiced against a group who don’t face a huge amount of discrimination, and a song that supposedly satirises bigotry by just saying exactly the same things that racists say…

By: arkhonia

arkhonia — Thu, 03 May 2012 09:45:30 +0000

“The big difference between what Newman does and what Davies did on Black Messiah is that songs like Short People and Sail Away, where he stays in character throughout, are so far outside the mainstream of opinion that no-one could possibly mistake them for Newman’s real views.”

Andrew, are you *sure* about this? It’s kinda common knowledge what the reaction to Short People was at the time…

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,312619,00.html

By: Andrew Hickey

Andrew Hickey — Thu, 03 May 2012 09:16:11 +0000

Well, I’ve never claimed any great expertise in “Rock Music” (why the capitalisation?), in part because I find most of it unutterably tedious. The Stones, in particular, became a sad parody of themselves around 1970.
My interest is in music, not just in some canonical list of ‘greatest bands/songs of all time’, and one of the things that was most interesting about the Kinks when they were doing their best work was that they were being influenced by music outside the normal ‘rock’ boundaries — there’s a great story of the Davies brothers being interviewed in 1964 or 65 and absolutely raving about the Modern Jazz Quartet, and there’s a Ray Davies interview in 1969 where he talks about how when he was writing Sunny Afternoon he was listening to Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra, Glenn Miller and Bach, and nothing else.
Now, the thing is, I *am* extremely familiar with all those musicians, and I can see their influence on the music. I could quite easily say “If you don’t know Place Vendome, the album on which the Modern Jazz Quartet perform baroque pieces by Bach and other composers with the Swingle Singers, how can you possibly comment on the Kinks’ music?”, but I don’t, because I am actually more interested in the opinions of people who have different frames of reference than I am in those of people who already agree with me.
That said, the point at which the Kinks’ music becomes much less interesting to me is the point in the mid-70s when they seem to lose all those influences from outside “Rock Music” (with capitals) and become just another bunch of boys with guitars…