Primer is The A.V. Club's ongoing series of beginners' guides to pop culture's most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you. This week: The Kinks, broken down by 20 songs that define their themes and styles, and five albums that every serious rock fan should own. Kinks leader Ray Davies releases his latest solo album, Working Man's Café, next week.
The Kinks 101
In early 2008, The Kinks wound up, oddly and out of the blue, at the top of the U.S. album chart. Admittedly, that didn't have much to do with Ray Davies and company, who have been on hiatus as a group since 1996. It was Juno's recent Oscar nominations that catapulted the film's soundtrack into Billboard's number-one spot. And nestled between the disc's indie-pop and classic rock cuts is The Kinks' "A Well Respected Man," a top-20 hit from 1965 that predicted the wit, sophistication, and iconoclasm the band would make its trademarks.
The Juno soundtrack's sudden success is just the latest twist in the long, unpredictable chart history of The Kinks—inarguably one of the greatest, most vital rock bands of all time. Yet The Kinks had all the initial commercial promise of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Who, contemporaries that have perpetually overshadowed the group. Formed in 1963 by London-born brothers and singer-guitarists Ray and Dave Davies, the group hit pay dirt with its third single, 1964's epochal "You Really Got Me," as well as its immediate follow-up, the similarly slashing "All Day And All Of The Night." It's hard to hear such overplayed, over-licensed songs with new ears, but their jagged sensuality and adenoidal snarl still have the power to liquefy gray matter. Taken together, they're a building block of rock 'n' roll; even if the band had broken up at the end of 1964, The Kinks would have become legendary as forefathers of heavy metal and punk rock.
In spite of their early reputation for raw, provocative rock, The Kinks always drew from richer sources. Granted, Dave—while unfairly stereotyped as a one-dimensional guitar-basher—had more of an affinity for the frenzy of Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran. But Ray idolized crooners like Frank Sinatra, country craftsmen like Chet Atkins (and especially the lonesome Hank Williams), and urbane showtunes à la Rodgers and Hammerstein. That fraternal tension has since become infamous—and it's easy to hear as far back as 1965's "Tired Of Waiting For You," a song that's evenly split between slow, solemn melancholy and sharply riffed angst. "Tired Of Waiting" became The Kinks' third and last top-10 hit in the U.S. until 1970's "Lola" a funny, poignant anthem of gender ambiguity and erotic confusion that helped set the stage for emerging, openly androgynous stars like David Bowie and T. Rex's Marc Bolan.
The Kinks have since suffered an eternal stretch of hitlessness, as well as a string of poor-selling albums often hampered by overblown concepts, tired tunes, and bloodless production. But they briefly livened up that dry patch in 1983 with "Come Dancing." Ray credits MTV and the song's kinetic, nostalgic video for breaking "Come Dancing" in the States, where it became that band's fifth and final top-10 single. As a Kinks song, it ain't so hot. As an '80s pop hit, it's brilliant: Clever, bubbly, and calypso-flavored, it could easily pass as one of Madness' best tunes.
Intermediate work
Madness, of course, was just one of the many exciting new groups of the late '70s and early '80s that had strong roots in The Kinks' music. The Jam was The Kinks' clearest heir, and the young band honored its ancestor with a tightly wound version of "David Watts," Ray's class-conscious stomper from 1967; meanwhile, everyone from The Fall and Mission Of Burma to The Pretenders and Van Halen was also covering The Kinks in the studio and onstage.
David Watts by The Kinks
"David Watts" is the opening track of Something Else By The Kinks, the band's first major artistic breakthrough. While much of its predecessor, 1966's Face To Face, is sonically and lyrically innovative—like the hit single "Sunny Afternoon," a mocking yet sensitive character study of the idle rich—Something Else beams confidence and maturity. The band needed it:≈ In 1965, the American Federation Of Musicians had banned them from touring the U.S., presumably due to the group's rock-star hooliganism, and the subsequent estrangement from America's UK-hungry music fans contributed to Ray Davies' nervous breakdown and the band's near-breakup. That desperation fueled Face To Face, but it had stabilized by the time Something Else was in the works, and the result was "Waterloo Sunset," widely regarded as the best song Davies has ever written. A shy yet soaring story dealing with voyeurism and isolation, the single also boasts immaculate craftsmanship and a sumptuous arrangement. Davies' ghostly yet gutsy delivery still moves emotional mountains.
Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks
Two non-album singles released around the time of Face To Face and Something Else, "Dead End Street" and "Days" are flip-sides of Ray Davies' genius. The first is an acidic, whimsically cynical portrait of poverty and hopeless hope, while the second is stately, plainspoken, and in earnest awe of love. They also illustrate the myriad, often overlapping approaches Davies takes to songwriting: Sometimes speaking in character, sometimes autobiographically, and often in some tricky combination of both, he brought a literary complexity to pop music that still echoes.
Davies' heady combination of sarcasm and sincerity, novel and diary, is the bedrock of "The Village Green Preservation Society." The title track of one of The Kinks' most revered albums, "Village Green" is a vividly masked pastiche of Davies' conflicting appreciation and suspicion of the past—one that finds time to laugh at its own breathless joy while making a double-edged statement about social conservatism. Village Green is also The Kinks' first fully realized concept album, a format the band would use both wisely and recklessly in the years to come.
Soon after Village Green's release, the U.S. ban on The Kinks' live shows was lifted. But instead of making their music more universal in an attempt to woo the States again, Davies and crew released their most blatantly, idiosyncratically British album to date. 1969's Arthur (Or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire) is a song-cycle steeped in English history and sociology, and its sprawling tracks remain resonant, insightful, and ambitious. Ironically, America ate it up; while it didn't exactly set the U.S. charts on fire, it reestablished the band critically in a land that had almost forgotten them, and paved the way for the massive success of "Lola" the following year. Among the disc's solid wall of amazing tunes are the jaunty, acerbic "Victoria" and the staggering "Shangri-La," an anguished epic that's nearly a rock opera unto itself.
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