Kink-y Paleocons?
It’s easy for a Republican to get an inferiority complex in Manhattan. When the guy at the desk beside you with the Nader poster is also a published poet who fronts a jazz band at night, it can be hard for a conservative to retain intellectual assurance. Cool sophisticates never show up at the Stupid Party:
We’ve got few authors and even fewer actors.
Rock stars? There’s Ted Nugent and that guy in the Ramones who voted for Reagan. And even those are unsatisfying. Nugent’s “Yank Me Crank Me” and “Wang Dang Sweet Poon-Tang” do indeed express powerful emotions, yet his body of work often fails to impress the soi-disant.
Then there’s Ray Davies, singer-songwriter for The Kinks, who sang in 1971:
“I was born in a welfare state/ruled by bureaucracy/controlled by civil servants/and people dressed in gray.” I’m a twentieth century man but I don’t wanna die here.” Davies made it out of the 20th century, but with the modern world aligned against him it was a close-run thing. And his lyrics reveal, of all things, a traditionalist who distrusts big government.
November marks the 30th anniversary of “Muswell Hillbillies,” neglected in its own time but given a second chance thanks to Velvel Records rerelease (along with the rest of The Kinks’ 70s-era concept albums). The New York Press’s provocative J.R. Taylor goes so far as to call it the best alternative country album ever, beating anything by The Byrds.
The romantic pose, the sophistication and artsy credibility that seem the birthright of all hip liberals – Ray Davies has it all in spades. This the man who wrote “Waterloo Sunset,” regretful and sad and generous, told from the perspective of a lonely man who watches two young lovers meet in a train station and cross the river.
“Muswell Hillbillies” was The Kinks’ first album for the major American label RCA. On the heels of the 1971 hit single and eternal classic “Lola,” the album confounded all but The Kinks’ cultists-no hit singles, no radio anthems. Just 12 songs (with two unreleased extras on the reissue) revolving around Muswell Hill, Davies’ childhood home in North London, which was bombed in World War II and razed in the name of urban renewal after the war.
In the liner notes Davies says: “There were bomb sites everywhere. In other places they kept the old houses the way they were, and built new ones where the ruins had been. But ’round where my family lived, the local council obviously thought it was easier to clear the entire area and start again. There was just one problem. They forgot the people.”
“Muswell Hillbillies” is suffused with London themes set to ironically upbeat American country and blues, plus a couple of impossibly catchy music hall songs, “Alcohol,” a temperance track, and “Holiday,” about a working-class holiday in rainy, polluted England.
Unlike Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska,” (a different kind of classic), which is grievous in both its music and lyrics, the “Muswell” sound is defiantly jumpy and works against the grain of the lyrics to great ironic effect.
The record is a treasure trove of quirky riches. “Have A Cuppa Tea,” about Davies’ grandmother and her remedy for all ills, seems patronizing until you realize he’s not being ironic. That’s followed by the harrowing “Holloway Jail,” about brutality in a women’s prison, told from the standpoint of a tormented boyfriend.
Over the Stones-y clomp of the title track Davies declares: “They can clear the slums as part of their solution, but they’re never gonna kill my cockney pride.” The poor of Appalachia were bruited about in similar fashion, tossed off their land and into government housing by federal fiat, first by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, then by LBJ’s Appalachian Regional Development Act.
Even more than most Kinks albums, the lyrics on “Muswell” pile on the conspiracies to absurdity and beyond-“the milkman’s a spy, and the grocer keeps on following me,” but you know what they say about paranoids. And Davies’ makes up for it with the line “The income tax collector’s got his beady eye on me.” “Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues” joins the too-short list of rock songs that rebel against democracy’s most intrusive figure, alongside “Taxman” by The Beatles and “Taxman, Mr. Thief” by Cheap Trick.
Like G.K. Chesterton, the sublime religious essayist of the early 20th century, The Kinks songs assert the magic of fable and the wonder of innocence. Davies writes in his autobiography: “While everybody else thought that the hip thing to do was drop acid, do as many drugs as possible and listen to music in a coma, the Kinks were singing songs about lost friends, draught beer, motorbike riders, wicked witches and flying cats.”
In a similar vein, Chesterton notes “the things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales.” I knew the magic beanstalk before I had tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I was certain of the moon.”
Though the band’s been shelved and Davies’ output is limited to occasional solo shows, Davies’ stubborn traditionalism continues to rankle leftwing music critics like Robert Christgau. During the apartheid era in South Africa, the Village Voice’s eminent record critic banned The Kinks from his reviews after the band refused to stop playing South Africa. He termed them “cultural reactionaries lost past their prime.” Never mind that “Lola” did more to open minds about alternative sexuality than 1,000 self-righteous news releases from GLAAD.
For Christgau, Davies is the wrong kind of rebel, one who mocks the “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” as well as the businessman smugness of the “Well Respected Man”-coming down on group-think socialism and soulless corporatism alike.
Though the title of “20th Century Man” unfortunately dates it, “Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues” and “Here Come The People In Grey” (to take me away), resonate in an age of security cameras and the deportation of Cuban kids. There are a half-dozen tracks on this country-rock masterpiece that conservatives will identify with. My advice is to buy it and pick your own favorites.