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Persona and Voice in the Kinks' Songs of the Late 1960s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Matthew Gelbart
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Abstract

During the later 1960s, the Kinks wrote many songs confronting the dominant reception trope of reading the rock star as iconic ‘youth’ who ‘authentically’ presented his or her life on stage. The present article approaches this issue through Edward T. Cone's and other work on voice and persona in music. Several specific Kinks songs from the period are analysed, focusing on the divergence between vocal ‘protagonists’ and other personae or voices appearing in the music, which make it difficult to map the protagonists onto the writer/performer directly. The methods explored have broader implications for analysing rock songs as musical-cultural artefacts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 128 , Issue 2 , 2003 , pp. 200 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 2003

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References

Many thanks to Wendy Allanbrook for her early encouragement and constructive criticism of this study; to Alexia and Monique Montibon for sharing their collection of rare Kinks material; to Mary Ann Smart, Ben Walton, Tom Grey, Tony Newcomb, Petra Gelbart and the anonymous readers who have all read drafts and made suggestions to strengthen the article; and to Nicholas Cook and Andy Linehan for their helpful guidance with copyright matters.Google Scholar

1 Ray Davies, X-Ray: The Unauthorized Autobiography (Woodstock, NY, 1994), 11.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., 9.Google Scholar

3 See, for example, Jon Savage, The Kinks: The Official Biography (London, 1984); Johnny Rogan, The Kinks: The Sound and the Fury (London, 1984); Allan F. Moore, Rock: The Primary Text (2nd edn, Aldershot, 2001), 101–2.Google Scholar

4 Cone, Edward T., The Composer's Voice (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1974), 1.Google Scholar

5 Cone does explore the application of his ideas to instrumental music as well, but it is clear that the original source of his thought was in vocal music, and his ideas are more compelling, and more convincing, in dealing with vocal genres.Google Scholar

6 Cone, The Composer's Voice, 21. Cone tends to use this term even in predominantly lyrical songs with little narrative implication. The word is useful as such, and I will also use it in its fairly broad sense to mean the poetic ‘I’ of any song.Google Scholar

7 Ibid., 16.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., 18.Google Scholar

9 Ibid.Google Scholar

10 Fred Everett Maus, ‘Introduction: The Composer's Voice as Music Theory’, College Music Symposium, 29 (1989), 1–7 (p. 5n.).Google Scholar

11 Cone, ‘Poet's Love or Composer's Love’, Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge and New York, 1992), 177–92 (p. 179). (This text was originally given as a conference paper in 1988.)Google Scholar

12 Ibid., 181–2.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., 181. As a most obvious example, songs with two or more distinct ‘characters’, such as Schubert's Der Erlkönig (through which Cone approaches his original discussion), need to be dealt with differently from the intimate outpourings of a poet who seems to express the composer's own artistic dilemmas. In reality, then, Cone did not reverse himself as dramatically as Maus implies, though I will keep using the tags ‘Cone 1’ and ‘Cone 2’ for convenience. These aspects of Cone's work have also been followed up and critiqued with regard to opera. See Kivy, Peter, ‘Opera Talk: A Philosophical “Phantasie”’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 3 (1991), 63–77; David Rosen, ‘Cone and Kivy's “World of Opera”’, and Ellen Rosand, ‘Operatic Ambiguities and the Power of Music’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 4 (1992), 61–74 and 75–80.Google Scholar

14 See, for example, Suzanne G. Cusick, ‘Gender and the Cultural Work of a Classical Music Performance’, Repercussions, 3 (1994), 77–110.Google Scholar

15 Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1991), 13. The idea of ‘decentred voices’ has been a running theme in Abbate's work; so far its most in-depth theoretical exposition is in this book.Google Scholar

16 For Abbate, however, it does imply a bodily source, whether incarnate or abstract (Unsung Voices, 12–14).Google Scholar

17 On the development of the category of ‘folk music’ and its implications, see Gelbart, Matthew, ‘Scotland and the Emergence of “Folk Music” and “Art Music” in Europe, 1720–1850’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2002). For a wide-ranging discussion of mediation in rock music, see Middleton, Richard, Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia, 1990). On semiotic surveys of rock, which often apply linguistic terms such as ‘coding’ to questions of mediation in rock music, see esp. pp. 172–6. On the ‘bodily’, a term that has been used both to praise and to denigrate popular music, see esp. pp. 258–67. Dave Laing also discusses the ‘ideology of sincerity of performance’ as an important factor when considering voice in rock songs (One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock, Milton Keynes and Philadelphia, 1985, 63–4).Google Scholar

18 Allan Moore has argued compellingly against the idea that the blues itself is a less ‘mediated’ genre, noting the insidious racist or cultural-essentialist assumptions underlying such hypotheses – namely that black music is ‘primitive’, ‘feeling’ music while white music is ‘thinking’ music. The blues itself follows a series of codes and rules that are meant to communicate this very ‘unmediated’ quality (Moore, Rock, 73–7, 198–201). See also Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Oxford and New York, 1996), 127–9.Google Scholar

19 This whole network of ideals could perhaps be seen as an extension of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romantic fascination with the ‘direct’ expression of ‘the folk’, however artificially constructed such categories are. There is evidence that this mode of listening was central in many pre-rock forms of popular music as well, though that is beyond the scope of this article.Google Scholar

20 See, for example, the following quotations from a relatively early study of rock, Richard Middleton's Pop Music and the Blues (London, 1972). The blues is defined as the place to find black identity, both communal and individual (pp. 27, 49, etc.), and from this Middleton extrapolates about pop: ‘The pop singer's naivety, and the resulting lack of a gulf between him and his audience, is an important part of his appeal. He is the “boy next door”, just as the town blues singer is the representative of his people's experience … The relationship between the community and the individual is centred in the pop singer. Like the town bluesman, he represents the community because of his role and aura (image), and he thus distils its experience as well as his own … He is universal (the “boy next door”) and unique (the pinpoint of teenage aspiration)‘ (p. 132).Google Scholar

21 When some later styles have moved away from valorizing simplicity, there has often been backlash. Punk, for example, reacted against the pretension of progressive rock and the decadence of mainstream seventies rock by a symbolic return to ‘three chords’.Google Scholar

22 Cynics such as Adorno were terrified by the individuality apparently sacrificed in this sort of listening experience in popular musics. For him, the process of identification in pop-music consumption was artificially created – resulting entirely from capitalist manipulation. Such scepticism is the other extreme to the assumption that all rock music is entirely sincere. By now, countless writers have addressed this issue; it was a burning question during the early years of rock musicology. See, for example, Middleton, Studying Popular Music, Chapter 2; Simon Frith, The Sociology of Rock (London, 1978); Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London, 1979); Antoine Hennion, ‘The Production of Success: An Anti-Musicology of the Pop Song’, Popular Music, 3 (1983), 159–93, reprinted slightly abridged in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (London, 1990), 185–206. It seems clear that all of this music is a balance between manipulation and ‘artistry’, between record-industry control and consumer choice, and between mediation and directness. Reception patterns, too, are partly determined by industry manipulation, but rely heavily on factors out of industry control, and it is quite possible to suspend one's disbelief during a ‘communal’ listening experience without sacrificing one's knowledge or individual subjectivity in the long run.Google Scholar

23 It was not until Beatlemania that people really began to differentiate between group members. Earlier, either one personality was clearly the ‘lead singer’ and the others backup support whose ‘personae’ were grafted onto that lead singer, or else the whole group had a collective persona. Even with the Beatles, the collective mop-cut beast was usually a single persona when the group sang. Or, conversely, fans who longed passionately for, say, Paul McCartney felt that specifically he was singing to them when he crooned, and the other Beatles fell away. (Frith makes this point as well – see Performing Rites, 201.) In general, I feel that the single protagonist-composer model is applicable to the Beatles' output, at least until their later work. For an investigation of this persona, and then a rereading offering a darker view of the protagonist-composer of two early Beatles songs by John Lennon, see Daniel Beller-McKenna, ‘Beatle-John's “Alter Ego”‘, Music and Letters, 80 (1999), 254–68.Google Scholar

24 In some songs or styles, the whole verse was sung in harmony, though I do not think this affects the perception that it emanates from a single protagonist-poet. (Cone's musing about personae in Monteverdi madrigals makes for an interesting comparison here; similar issues are raised, though the answers may be a bit different in rock music; see The Composer's Voice, 72–4.)Google Scholar

25 Some recent analysis of gospel music has focused on dialogical readings, building on the principle of ‘signifyin(g)’ – a term honed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr, to capture the tendency toward intertextual reference (homage, pastiche, one-upmanship, etc.) characteristic of much African-American expressive culture (see his The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, New York, 1988). The term has been transferred to musical analysis by Samuel A. Floyd, Jr, in ‘Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and Black Music Inquiry’, Black Music Research Journal, 11 (1991), 265–87. (See also the application of these ideas in David Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music, paperback edn with new preface, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000, Chapter 4.) For Gates and Floyd, signifyin(g) musically or orally can take forms running all the way from audience ‘shouting’ and ‘testifying’ during a gospel performance to rapping, jazz improvisation or ‘playing the dozens’ (p. 271). Obviously, ‘signifyin(g)’ is an extremely broad concept (at times almost too broad to retain coherent meaning across divergent aspects of performance). Several factors suggest that call-and-response, ‘shouting’ and ‘testifying’ among gospel performers and audience members are, in general, more unifying communal activities than many other aspects that have been classified as signifyin(g). For example, Tony Heilbut's The Gospel Sound: Good News in Bad Times (New York, 1971) contains several quotations from singers and the gospel community (e.g., ‘In church we ain't ashamed to be real’, p. 15) and Heilbut responds with a typical critical reading suggesting lack of mediation: ‘But the most universal approval comes for honesty of emotion … The character is never in doubt; gospel singers look the part … Gospel singers need an audience that shares their feelings and acknowledges their efforts at self-expression … Gospel audiences also respond as one to their music … the church may shudder and roar as one, “Whoo,” “Hah,” “Yessir,” “My Lord My Lord.” … It's this feeling of a community caught up in the spiritual moment that turns gospel into a “foretaste of glory”’ (pp. 11–18). For a specific analysis of some gospel music as individual voices subsumed into a communal experience, see Marks, Morton, ‘“You Can't Sing Unless You're Saved”: Reliving the Call in Gospel Music’, African Religious Groups and Beliefs: Papers in Honor of William R. Bascom, ed. Simon Ottenberg (Meerut, India, 1982), 305–31.Google Scholar

26 The textual and textural combination was often further compounded with harmonic resolution, especially when it lined up with the structural arrival of the chorus. In songs with a clear ‘verse–chorus’ structure, this moment of confluence often came with the onset of, or lead into, the chorus, and could last the entire chorus (e.g. Mark Dinning's 1959 hit ‘Teen Angel‘).Google Scholar

27 There is much variety in the application of this principle, of course. Many songs begin with the unison moment and return to it, and/or have three levels. For example, in the Beach Boys' ‘Surfin’ Safari' (1962), each verse is sung with the backup vocals on ‘ooh’. At the chorus, the backups switch to repeating ‘surf, surf, surfin’ safari' against the lead vocalist's ‘Come on baby …'. Only at the hook, ‘Let's go surfin’ now, everybody's learning how, come on a safari with me!’, do the voices align into homorhythmic declamation.Google Scholar

28 On the electric guitar as extension of the body, as ‘technophallus’, see Waksman, Steve, Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Cambridge and London, 1999), 5–6 and (on Chuck Berry) 152–7. Waksman follows this issue through in discussing Jimi Hendrix (see esp. pp. 187–90) and then Led Zeppelin, ‘cock rock’ and further developments (see Chapter 7 and conclusion).Google Scholar

29 Whereas Abbate's thought seems to have been triggered both by Cone and by French post-structuralists such as Barthes, Laing does not mention Cone at all, relying almost entirely on the consciously interdisciplinary vocabulary of the post-structuralists, and concentrating almost entirely on the lyrics and the vocal stances of the singers. (He is attentive to delivery and accents, but leaves factors such as melody and harmony out of his discussion of voice.) See Laing, One Chord Wonders, 54–73.Google Scholar

30 Ibid., 67–8. Interestingly, Frith also discusses this song in his recent chapter on voice, but without reference to Laing, and from a different angle (Performing Rites, 195–6).Google Scholar

31 Laing, One Chord Wonders, 65–7.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., 67.Google Scholar

33 Richard Middleton, ‘Authorship, Gender and the Construction of Meaning in the Eurythmics’ Hit Recordings’, Cultural Studies, 9 (1995), 465–85.Google Scholar

34 Frith, Performing Rites, Chapter 9, pp. 183–202.Google Scholar

35 Ibid., 199.Google Scholar

36 Frith's Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock (London, 1983), a rewrite of his earlier Sociology of Rock, does already mention ‘irony’ as the ‘pop lyricist's central tool’ (p. 36); but at this point Frith seems to mean the trick of using extremely simple banalities to create a real sonic vitality and rise above the mundane through in-jokes and other tools, rather than the perceived distance and ‘layers’ of interpretative meaning he speaks of in Performing Rites.Google Scholar

37 Simon Frith, ‘The Sociology of Rock: Notes from Britain’, Popular Music Perspectives: Papers from the First International Conference of Popular Music Research, Amsterdam, June 1981, ed. David Horn and Philip Tagg (Göteborg and Exeter, 1982), 142–54 (p. 152; see also pp. 149–50, 153). On punk's creation of distance and drawing attention to its artificiality, see also Frith, Sound Effects, 161–2.Google Scholar

38 Frith, ‘The Sociology of Rock’, 152. Like Frith and Middleton, David Brackett has recently reproblematized the idea of authorship in all forms of popular music, making it one of the central themes of his recent book Interpreting Popular Music (see esp. pp. 2, 14–17). His chapters on Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Hank Williams and James Brown focus partly on how images of these stars' authenticity were constructed by different audiences. For my purposes, Brackett's consideration of personae in these cases does not seem to contradict the possibility of reading songs as emanating from a single protagonist (or the fact that it was a historical trend to read them in this way). For example, Brackett's discussion of the ‘multiple voices’ in country music (p. 106) is interesting; but hearing ‘Desire’ in ‘songs of Loss’, or vice versa, because of Hank Williams's individual performances does not undermine the centrality of Williams as protagonist-composer. Loss and desire here are intermingled aspects of the same persona, conflicted elements that make Williams ‘authentic’ as a single individual who feels complex and ambivalent emotions. In other words, the different ‘voices’ emanate from the same persona – a persona that generates both the words and the way in which they are framed, creating an overall state of mind (Brackett does not distinguish between voice and persona). It is only when Brackett approaches Elvis Costello in his last chapter that he invokes the idea of multiple and fractured personae within a song, ‘confusing the sense of “who” is speaking’ (pp. 170–1). Costello, of course, comes from the post-punk period in which many performers and audiences began to experiment with different paradigms for persona construction and reception; this is a good ten years after the Kinks' music I will discuss.Google Scholar

39 One of the most important considerations here is the widening of styles resulting from the split between so-called ‘pop’ and ‘rock’ music during the mid-1960s (though elements of the distinction stretch back to the late 1950s). Strikingly, elements of the early-rock model survived in both the newer categories, which were entrenched by the mid–late sixties; but complications arose as well with both rock and pop. In ‘rock’ music, the visual and textural elements of the early model were challenged. Meanwhile, ‘pop’ preserved more of the early model in terms of presentation, but raised other questions. For example, ‘pop’ musicians generally did not write their own music and often did not play their own instruments, both of which rock musicians did do. With pop, then, there is the potential for a definite layering of voices, with producer, performer, instrumentalist and composer all surfacing at different times or simultaneously. An early example is Phil Spector's work with ‘girl groups’ in the early–mid 1960s. The lyrics and the texture of such hits as the Ronettes' ‘Be my Baby’ or ‘Baby, I Love You’ (both 1963), for example, reinforce – even take to the extreme – the image of the sincere protagonist-as-spontaneous-composer persona. On the other hand, Spector, who both wrote and produced the songs, himself developed a strong musical persona – to the point where people often fail to remember which of his groups (the Crystals, the Ronettes, etc.) sang a particular hit. Pop, then, seems to offer a wider discrepancy between possible reading modes. Perhaps the joy in mature listening comes from balancing the suspension of disbelief (that comes from identifying with the protagonist-composer) with a broader picture that recognizes the producer's mediating persona.Google Scholar

Barbara Bradby has offered a very different reading of the girl-group songs (‘Do-Talk and Don't-Talk: The Division of the Subject in Girl-Group Music’, On Record, ed. Frith and Goodwin, 341–68). Bradby sees the subject (i.e. the protagonist within the song) in girl-group music as significantly less unified than that in male doo-wop, pop and rock of the time, and believes it is an error to presume that these songs emanate from a single subject, even when disregarding questions about producers and writers (pp. 346, 358–65). While I find her methodology original and provocative, I am not convinced, for example, that the chorus repeating ‘You're gonna want me for your girl’ in the fadeout of the Chiffons' ‘One Fine Day’ ‘makes a mockery of the intended sense of the line as sung by the lead singer, which envisages a time when the boy will want to stop running around with other girls and settle down with her’ (p. 361). Granted, the other singers often act as an ‘audience’ in this and other girl-group songs, but that does not undermine their fundamental fusion with the ‘protagonist’. When Bradby argues that the ‘lead’ singer is often eclipsed by the other vocalists in girl-group music, I would draw the opposite conclusion to hers: namely, that the subject is even more ‘universal’ and unified, if often ambivalent or internally torn by a romantic longing or a difficult decision. This can be supported by Bradby's own argument that the group vocals often underline uncertainty in the words (pp. 361–2); in other words, these ‘voices’ cause no friction with received models when read as uncertainty (and there does seem to be more of this here than in music with male vocalists at the time) emanating from within the protagonist. Bradby herself notes that listeners go to great lengths to hear the songs in this way – that is, to hear dialogue as different voices of a single person (p. 364, and see note 23). The example offered by Bradby that I agree does indeed force a reading as emanating from ‘multiple personae’ is the Shirelles' ‘Foolish Little Girl’, since it seems openly a dialogue between two speakers. This I still hear in relatively simple terms, though: the song has two ‘protagonists’ interacting.Google Scholar

To return to the question of ‘rock’ and ‘pop’: since ‘pop’ is notoriously hard to define in the first place (depending on whether one asks a pop-lover or -hater for the definition; see Moore, Rock, 3–4, 64), and since I believe the reception model I am constructing applied, with certain adjustments, to both ‘pop’ and ‘rock’, I will not concern myself further with the distinction in this article.Google Scholar

40 Andrew Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture (Minneapolis, 1992), 100.Google Scholar

41 On Madonna's multifaceted use of personae, see Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis, 1991), Chapter 7: ‘Living to Tell: Madonna's Resurrection of the Fleshly’, esp. p. 149.Google Scholar

42 Antoine Hennion's famous study of rock producers showed that they were highly attuned to the importance of the musicians' personae to potential consumers in the seventies (see his ‘The Production of Success’, original version, 164, 177, 182–6).Google Scholar

43 See Goodwin's point that rock reception carries on the Romantic (in the sense of nineteenth-century) notion that ‘art’ emanates directly from the artist's being or soul, and that this is an important part of the whole mythology of ‘sincerity’ (Dancing in the Distraction Factory, 104–5).Google Scholar

44 Deena Weinstein, ‘Rock is Youth/Youth is Rock’, America's Musical Pulse: Popular Music in Twentieth-Century Society, ed. Kenneth J. Bindas (Westport, CT, 1992), 91–8 (esp. p. 97); Weinstein, ‘Rock: Youth and its Music’, Popular Music and Society, 9 (1985), 2–15; Middleton, ‘Authorship, Gender and the Construction of Meaning’, 466.Google Scholar

45 Middleton, ‘Authorship, Gender and the Construction of Meaning’, 468. On Bowie's play with personae, see also Laing, One Chord Wonders, 24–6, and Moore, Rock, 201–7.Google Scholar

46 See, for example, George Tremlett, David Bowie: Living on the Brink (London, 1996), 78–9.Google Scholar

47 In addition to McClary's and Brackett's work see, for example, Peter Mercer-Taylor's discussion of Elvis Costello's persona in ‘Elvis Costello Opens his Mouth Almighty’, Repercussions, 4 (1995), 26–52.Google Scholar

48 The Chicago blues style had of course relied heavily on guitar riffs, but the permeation of this element, coming not only as an articulation between phrases (as it did in the blues), but as a distorted, sharply articulated foundation on which the whole melodic, rhythmic and harmonic content is based, is hard to find earlier in a group rock song.Google Scholar

49 There was a popular legend that future Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page performed the solo on the single, but this is almost certainly untrue (see Hinman, Doug, You Really Got Me: An Illustrated World Discography of the Kinks, 1964–1993, Rumford, RI, 1994, 10).Google Scholar

50 The first three Kinks albums all carried individual profiles of the group members, probably in the wake of the Beatles' big break in February 1964. But even these profiles seem comfortably absorbed into the group persona in a more abstract sense. The profiles were still listed clearly as elements of ‘the Kinks’, and any of them could be mapped onto any of the song-protagonists during the listening experience.Google Scholar

51 I am grateful to Wye J. Allanbrook for bringing this to my attention.Google Scholar

52 In reality, of course, even the guitar's distorted timbre was not unmediated or ‘instinctive’ at all, having been carefully engineered through various experiments with razor blades and pins or knitting needles stuck through speaker cones (see Savage, The Kinks, 32, and John Mendelssohn, The Kinks Kronikles, New York, 1985, 36–41).Google Scholar

53 And its similar follow-up, ‘All Day and All of the Night’ (October 1964), which not only contains another all-pervasive riff, but shares the same displaced accents, on ‘all of the time’.Google Scholar

54 Rogan comes closest, discussing its ‘anti-romantic cynicism’ and breakaway from sixties teenage love songs (The Kinks, 24–5). Still, this is taken as part of its earnest, snarling rebellion rather than as a tongue-in-cheek gesture.Google Scholar

55 This trope of reception began right away. For example, Melody Maker had a column called ‘Blind Date’, in which each week a guest performer reviewed newly released singles without being told who had recorded the songs. Dave Berry was the guest reviewer for the week; he guessed the single was the Kingsmen (the Kinks were not yet known – this would become their first hit) and claimed: ‘It's fabulous this one. I like these records that sound as if they've gone into a recording studio and done what they wanted on the spot’ (Melody Maker, 8 August 1964, 11). So the reinforcement of the ‘spontaneous’ reception pattern was off to a good start.Google Scholar

56 The metal group Van Halen even released a cover of ‘You Really Got Me’ in 1978. (Mott the Hoople had also covered the song, in 1969.)Google Scholar

57 In the former, the protagonist gazes out of his window over the ‘dirty old river’ Thames and watches lovers meet on a bridge, content in his resignation to stay at home alone and watch the world go by; in the latter, the protagonist thanks an ex-lover for all the good times, but in a twist during the song's bridge section confesses that now ‘the night is long, it just brings sorrow’. Nostalgia, the emotional kernel of both songs, is an inherently ambivalent emotion, and one of the most recurrent themes in Davies's writing. These songs capture the bitter-sweet sentiments they express with haunting musical details: for example, in ‘Waterloo Sunset’ the gently ethereal backup vocals and lazy vocal phrases that begin on the beat but end off it intersect with the bass line as it descends in scalar fashion from I to IV6.Google Scholar

58 The song had in fact been popularized before the First World War by music-hall giant Harry Champion.Google Scholar

59 Davies's comments about an early press interview are interesting here: ‘Keith Altham of the New Musical Express hated the record. I talked to him about duality and people, bisexuality and things like that, and the NME wouldn't print that sort of thing. They wanted us to be really normal, go-ahead … boys, you know, have a pint and piss off. But I wasn't like that’ (quoted in Savage, The Kinks, 60). Certainly Derek Johnson's early review of the song in the NME (30 August 1965, 4) is positive and makes no mention of sexuality. Given the chance, Davies broached the topic himself in print, perhaps frustrated that music-press reviewers were not taking the bait. The most interesting example of this is an interview with Maureen Cleave for her weekly ‘Disc Date’ column in the Evening Standard (28 August 1965, 7). Here Davies directly claimed the song was ‘about homosexuality’, about a man who is given ‘a rotten deal’ by women and turns to his ‘friends’. At the same time Davies tied himself into the equation by making provocative comments about pop music as a place to mix one's own identity with one's audience's. For example he told Cleave he was ‘writing a musical about a character who is a mixture of Hitler, John Charles, the footballer, and himself [i.e. Davies]. “It's really about everybody”, [Davies] said … “The biggest thing that could happen to me is if somebody could sit in a room all by themselves and listen to one of my songs and say: ‘That's part of me.'”’Google Scholar

60 Davies later claimed that the song ‘wasn't fiction. I can understand feeling like that … It's about being a youth who is not sure of his sexuality’; and he recalled telling his wife one night ‘If it wasn't for you, I'd be queer’ (Savage, The Kinks, 60). See also Mendelssohn, The Kinks Kronikles, 169, on Davies's ‘coyness’ about his sexuality. As Rogan notes, within the performance of ‘See my Friend(s)’ itself, Davies seems to sing ‘friend’ at one point and ‘friends’ at another, as if to play up the mystery (Rogan, The Kinks, 59).Google Scholar

61 Bellman explores the use of this musical effect in rock in ‘Indian Resonances in the British Invasion, 1965–1968’, The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Jonathan Bellman (Boston, MA, 1998), 292–306. See esp. pp. 303–4 for discussion of the raga reference in relation to this song's sense of ‘Otherness’ sympathetically mapped onto the protagonist persona. Note too that Jon Savage interprets the Kinks' two Indian-influenced songs as being particularly confessional and personal (The Kinks, 60).Google Scholar

62 The Bellman article deals extensively with the musical influence of ‘See my Friend(s)'. As for sales, ‘See my Friend(s)’ did reach no. 11 on the British charts and no. 111 on the US charts, but this was a weak performance in comparison to most of the Kinks’ singles since ‘You Really Got Me’ (see Hinman, You Really Got Me, 545, 549).Google Scholar

63 Ratner, Leonard G., Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York, 1980), 9. Especially in dealing with songs that have words, there can be confusion between ‘topic’ used in this sense and the normal meaning of the word, so I will follow Allanbrook in using the Greek version ‘topos’ (plural ‘topoi'). See Wye J. Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart (Chicago and London, 1983), 2. However, it will still be necessary to use the adjective ‘topical’, as in ‘topical analysis’, etc. On the subject of topoi as ‘signs’ see V. Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton, 1991), esp. p. 17 and Chapter 2 (pp. 26–50). In rock music, Philip Tagg's ambitious dissections of Abba's song ‘Fernando’ and the theme music to Kojak (‘Analysing Popular Music: Theory, Method and Practice’, Popular Music, 2 (1982), 37–67) set a precedent for semiotic analysis. Tagg breaks the sounds down into ‘musemes’ – his term for the ‘smallest possible units of musical meaning’ – and then puts these back together to create an overall reading of the song. Tagg's work is impressive in its creative approach and its exhaustive thoroughness. Whenever it is applicable, however, I believe topical analysis offers the great advantage that it naturally groups ‘musemes’ into larger units that work together. This can save a tremendous amount of time – it pre-sorts and prioritizes the parts (a step that even a supposedly ‘scientific’ study such as Tagg's must still do largely intuitively). Obviously, not all signs in the music can be accounted for by topical analysis, but I am not attempting complete semiotic analyses of the Kinks songs I will discuss. Most of the Kinks' work with voice can be examined through topoi; where it cannot I will deal with other signifiers on a case-by-case basis.Google Scholar

64 Moore, for example, noted the correlation between Bowie's play with personae and stylistic pastiche; see his Rock, 201–7. About the Eurythmics see Middleton, ‘Authorship, Gender, and the Construction of Meaning’. (Middleton had considered applying topical analysis to the Eurythmics' output, and rejected the idea; see p. 470. I do not consider the tool to be restricted in the way he sees it, however. The analysis of topoi can and should include noting their social significations.)Google Scholar

65 In Unsung Voices, Abbate is concerned primarily with the discursive distance required for music to become narrative (as opposed to mimetic). One example she gives is the slow epilogue that closes Dukas's The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Such a disruption she considers a musical parallel to the act of adding ‘he said’ onto the end of a quote (Abbate, Unsung Voices, 60). This is related to her argument that music must create a ‘past tense’ in order truly to narrate – that there must be a disjunction between the time of telling and the time that is told of (see pp. 52–4). But there is no reason why this sort of discursive voice should be limited to a narrative function. Elsewhere, Abbate has isolated similar moments of disjunction as the locus of decentred voices that are not narrative; most notably, see her discussion of the ‘envoicing’ of Salome in ‘Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women’, Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), 225–58 (pp. 246–52).Google Scholar

66 Savage, The Kinks, 68–71.Google Scholar

67 ‘Sunny Afternoon’. Words and music by Ray Davies. © 1966 Davray Music Ltd. Carlin Music Corporation, Iron Bridge House, 3 Bridge Approach, London NW1. Used by permission of Music Sales Ltd. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.Google Scholar

68 Davies, X-Ray, 285. There are also numerous press interviews in which Davies is asked to, or chooses to, look back on his general ambivalence and his relation to the personae he has created in his corpus of songs. For interviews that include discussion of or allusion to the theatricality of ‘Sunny Afternoon’ specifically, see for example John Hutchinson, ‘Kontemplating the Kinks: Nothing's as Bad as Ray Davies Thinks’, Musician, January 1987, 72–80 (esp. pp. 76ff.), and Charles Shaar Murray, ‘Tales of Drunkenness and Cruelty’, Q, September 1989, 70–4 (esp. p. 73; here the connection to ‘Sunny Afternoon’ is quite abstract, but inasmuch as the article's title is a quote from the song, it seems to hover ubiquitously). For an example of Davies projecting outward from the class issue to consider his general ambivalence as a songwriter, see Mendelssohn, The Kinks Kronikles, 166–7.Google Scholar

69 Hinman, You Really Got Me, 545, 549.Google Scholar

70 Savage, The Kinks, 71.Google Scholar

71 For an example of an old music-hall song with a march topos and a similar oom-pah feel and bass line, see Billy Merson's army-anecdote song ‘The Photo of the Girl I Left Behind’.Google Scholar

72 This refers to Soho's Carnaby Street, which was a centre for hip clothing sales in mid-sixties London.Google Scholar

73 The most famous of these songs is ‘Champagne Charlie’, originally sung by George Leybourne in the later nineteenth century. See Bailey, Peter, ‘Champagne Charlie: Performance and Ideology in the Music Hall Swell Song’, Music Hall: Performance and Style, ed. Jacqueline S. Bratton (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia, 1986), 49–69, 156–9.Google Scholar

74 ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’. Words and music by Ray Davies. © 1966 Davray Music Ltd. Carlin Music Corporation, Iron Bridge House, 3 Bridge Approach, London NW1. Used by permission of Music Sales Ltd. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.Google Scholar

75 The subtle variations in the drumming are typical of rock songs from this time.Google Scholar

76 These sound effects were the legacy of an earlier concept-album project; see below.Google Scholar

77 The ‘r’ is still heard in ‘winter’, but this is not incongruous, since the word is now followed by a vowel.Google Scholar

78 The group The Uglys released a version of this song in September 1966, between the recording and the release of the Kinks' own version. The Uglys' version is remarkably similar to the Kinks' own, though the shift in accent between the introduction and the body of the song is slightly less distinct.Google Scholar

79 Original liner notes to Something Else by the Kinks (released September 1967 as Pye NPL 18193). Quoted by permission.Google Scholar

80 Davies apparently claimed he did not hear Sergeant Pepper until two years after it came out (see Simels, Steve, ‘The Kinks: What Comes Next? An Early Retrospective’, The Kinks: Reflections on Thirty Years of Music, ed. Rebecca Bailey, Morehead, KY, 1994, 19–23 (p. 22)), though this stretches the imagination.Google Scholar

81 Rogan, The Kinks, 69.Google Scholar

82 Of the Beatles' output from this period, ‘She's Leaving Home’ could be read this way, but there I would argue that the rest of the song represents only another facet of the same protagonists who appear in the high-pitched first-person lines of the chorus. In ‘I am the Walrus’ the protagonist is indeed abstract, yet the song has traditionally been received as a drug-induced musing from within the mind of a single protagonist – there is no manipulated distance. To my mind, the closest the Beatles came to the kind of manipulation present in Village Green Preservation Society is ‘A Day in the Life’; but even here the two parts of the song, sung by Lennon and McCartney respectively, fit together to create what might be seen as different aspects of the same protagonist persona, the reflective and the active side.Google Scholar

83 A 12-track version was released in Scandinavia, France and New Zealand only weeks before the 15-track version released in the UK and US. See Hinman, You Really Got Me, 69–70, for recording and release history.Google Scholar

84 This reaction has been discussed in several places. See, for example, Savage, The Kinks, 80.Google Scholar

85 Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood was one important influence on the album's ‘concept’; see Rogan, The Kinks, 95–6.Google Scholar

86 Its follow-up album, Arthur, or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire (1969), was actually written to be the soundtrack to a rock-opera made-for-TV movie (the budget fell through, leaving only the album in the end). In the 1970s the Kinks did their most openly theatrical work, with albums such as Preservation (1973), Preservation Act 2 (1974) and Soap Opera (1975).Google Scholar

87 The album was released in both stereo and mono versions, like most albums of its time (see Hinman, You Really Got Me, 26–9, for background). In the case of this album, both versions were mixed and produced by Davies himself. The mono version obviously could not create the shifting spatial effects present on the stereo version, but the other studio effects do come through.Google Scholar

88 Consider the Kinks' version of ‘Long Tall Shorty’ or of Chuck Berry's ‘Beautiful Delilah’, for example, both on their first album. Here Dave Davies is the vocalist, but he is clearly trying to sing as hoarsely as possible. Ray sings in a similar tone on the same album's second track, ‘So Mystifying’. See also John Mendelssohn's liner notes for the Rhino Records CD re-release (Rhino R2 70315).Google Scholar

89 These words are from Johnny Rogan's discussion of this album, one of the few to mention any musical elements at all in connection with interpreting the lyrics. His observations about the first track, ‘Village Green Preservation Society’, are as follows: ‘The [song] is a rather quaint listing of the various institutions that need to be preserved. Davies is cast in the role of the saviour of our threatened British culture, though the inclusion of Donald Duck alongside village greens and cricket suggests that the ideal has already been bastardized. The cloying sentiment and smug attitude are fully conveyed through the inane singalong chorus’ (Rogan, The Kinks, 96). Allan Moore also singles out this album to discuss the evocative qualities of the Kinks' stylistic pastiche (Rock, 101–2).Google Scholar

90 Rogan, The Kinks, 96.Google Scholar

91 Another pairing example given by Rogan is ‘Picture Book’ and ‘People Take Pictures of Each Other’: ‘The former describes a pleasant browse through a photo album recalling happy memories, while the latter satirizes this very process and ponders on the absurdity of photographic representation as a means of proving one's existence’ (ibid., 96).Google Scholar

92 On the original 12-track release, it began the second side, thus balancing the opening track even more overtly.Google Scholar

93 See Savage, The Kinks, 101.Google Scholar

94 The first track on Sergeant Pepper also has a first-person-plural protagonist, but the Kinks' lyrics seem to invoke the issue of persona much more; this is another example of a technique used on Sergeant Pepper being given a very different spin by the Kinks.Google Scholar

95 It is amusing to consider Dave Davies's comments on the song in his own autobiography, for example. The younger Davies expressed his opinion that he was for the idea of preserving little shops and china cups, but thought his brother had gone a bit too far by adding virginity to the line (Kink: An Autobiography, New York, 1996, 106–7). Such a comment would never have been an issue in a song such as ‘You Really Got Me’. Ray Davies himself explained that ‘This started out to be a solo album for me but somebody just mentioned to me that the Kinks do try to preserve things – we are all for that looking back thing … All the things in the song are things I'd like to see preserved’ (Melody Maker, 30 November 1968, 8). It is also interesting to note that Peter Quaife left the group soon thereafter, apparently largely because Ray Davies was too dominant a voice in the group (see Savage, The Kinks, 104–5).Google Scholar

96 The progression in ‘Last of the Steam-Powered Trains’ could in fact be considered as the usual 12 bars, with a very slow measure, but I am considering it as 24 because of the drum pattern.Google Scholar

97 Davies, X-Ray, 119.Google Scholar

98 To the Kinks and others in the 1964 wave, the blues genre was losing its cachet as ‘sincere’ and ‘unmediated’ as it became more and more commercial and exploited. (In 1965, Davies himself had claimed that while he loved ‘Smokestack Lightnin“, Howlin’ Wolf's new single ‘Killing Floor’ was ‘authentic rubbish and bluff’; Melody Maker, 24 April 1965, 7.) The Rolling Stones would soon bring back with some force the blues as a basis for their music, of course. But even their most recently released album at the time when Village Green was in preparation, Their Satanic Majesties Request, had been more interested in Sergeant Pepper-like effects and less inclined toward their traditional reliance on the blues.Google Scholar

99 Quoted in Savage, The Kinks, 102. Two years later, the Kinks would release an entire concept album explicitly dealing with the conflict between the individual artist and the industry machine: Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround.Google Scholar

100 ‘Everybody wanted to know about steam trains a couple of years ago, but they don't any more. It's about me being the last of the renegades. All my friends are middle-class now. They've all stopped playing in clubs’ (Melody Maker, 30 November 1968, 8).Google Scholar

101 Davies's forays into other media carry on the play of voices seen in the late sixties albums. This is true not only of the autobiography but of the 1983 film Return to Waterloo. Here the medium allows the voices to come visually out of the mouths of various characters, characters who may or may not be figments of the film's protagonist's imagination, in a series of half-real events. A scene in which the voice of a television agony aunt begins to emerge from a train-station public address system is particularly notable. (The reciprocal influence of Pink Floyd's The Wall, the theatricality of which must have been influenced by Davies's work, is also palpable here.)Google Scholar