Mar. 02, 2011 - Issue #802 : Education 2011
Old Sounds
The Kinks
Lola Versus Powerman ...
Lola Versus Powerman ...
(Pye)
Originally released: 1970
One of the best things the Beatles ever did was break up. The individual members did plenty to disgrace the stone after that, of course, but they still have the nearly untouched perfection of the '60s; the Stones would be much easier to defend if Exile on Main Street was their Let it Be.
The Kinks never reached the heights of either of their British Invasion compatriots, but they sure did teach them a thing or two about depths. Spurred on by the increasingly acrimonious relationship of brothers/lead songwriters Ray and Dave Davies and a very unfortunate turn towards the easier-to-swallow, sometimes downright loungy side of melodious rock, the vast majority of their recorded output post-1970 is almost unlistenable, particularly if you have any experience with the clever and effortlessly catchy singles they filled the '60s with.
The 1970 more-or-less concept album Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, is pretty much the signpost for the downturn. A fly-over of the band's thoughts on the music industry they were by then thoroughly entrenched in, it's the last overall good Kinks album, it's as much a preservation of the pop craftsmanship and hazy melancholy that pervades their '60s classics as a stark vision of the schmaltz and wankery that was to come.
That tension is summed up more or less perfectly in "A Long Way From Home," a slow little piano-and-guitar ballad that typifies much of the ambivalence—or, really, barely muted disgust—Ray and Dave have towards the rock industry. It is a slow, sad track that drifts into treacle thanks to Ray's growing mawkishness. It's not hard to picture the Kinks of Village Green playing it more subtly melancholic, nor the Kinks of Preservation drowning its basic honesty with sentiment.
They hew much closer to their ideal cloudy but poignant grudging acceptance of change on "This Time Tomorrow," where Ray's titular refrain seems as much a hopeful encouragement as a depressed realization that today will be gone soon enough. Dave gets his own chance at a similar sentiment in the his commiserative "Strangers," which basically finds hope and brotherhood under the ceaseless pressure of life's unforgiving boot heel. Both of these songs walk a fine line between pity and exultation at being faced with an inevitability, and they're two of the finer songs in a canon that is impressively full of sublimely traipsing around that territory.
The rest is a mixed bag. The two big hits are a wryly fun number that has to be one of the top-two songs about hanging out with a transvestite ("Lola") and a pumped-up bit of schmaltz that sounds like the band trying to rip off the easy mood of the former ("Apeman"). Duelling numbers about how shitty music industry people really are (Ray's "Top of the Pops" and Dave's "Rats") are catchy enough with being sticky, and are more self-serving than particularly poignant. That would, unfortunately, become something of a tendency for the Kinks on their subsequent albums. V
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