I mean, to know me is to know I love The Kinks. I remember in high school a stoner girl in gym class said she was going to see The Kinks, and she was super excited. Even though I probably knew a lot of their songs back then, I don’t know that I knew them, The Kinks. I was pretty Beatle-centric in high school though, and more than a little grumpy that there wasn’t any Beatles tour planned.
The Kinks can be very Beatle-esque with some of their harmonies, and general vibe, but they also have more of an edge, and are funny. I mean, how can you not laugh at “Superman” or “I’m an Ape Man?” My favorite song might be “Waterloo Sunset,” or, frankly, “Lola.”
Lola is just an amazing song. I realized when quite young that the woman, Lola, was probably trans, though I doubt I knew what trans was as a thing, but I knew that some men felt like women. And frankly I didn’t know it could happen in reverse, though I have spent a lot of my own life feeling more masculine than feminine. I would not call myself trans, but I would say that I understand that gender is fluid, and probably freaking hormonal as well. Plus, we’ve spent centuries demonizing “female” traits as weak or unserious, so it’s easy to imagine women attempting to be taken seriously would feel more masculine, or masculine leaning, and how any man wanting to have an emotional life might be afraid of being called weak.
It’s funny, this song has been in my head since I awoke this morning, and then, when I went to look up the YouTube video, I saw that Moby doesn’t like it.
But there it is, an article in the Irish Times about it:
Click the photo above to go to the article.
I love this, from the article:
“Who the f**k is Moby?” Ray Davies, of The Kinks, said on hearing that the musician had taken issue with one of the band’s signature hits.
“He’s someone who does quite well,’ his brother, Dave, explained. “I don’t know anything about the guy.”
HA! I feel the same. I have little to no experience of Moby, and what I have heard has not interested me. My gosh, how grown is Moby? Does he not understand that “Lola” being released, getting played, and becoming incredibly popular, in 1970, was groundbreaking? Yes, it’s a little bit funny, but The Kinks are funny. Funny people are better than serious ones, just sayin’ Moby. Often first forays into things are imperfect, and not what we would want maybe in a modern view, but to deny that it took on a lot of taboos and normalized them, I mean the song never gets worried about masculinity or societal norms. “That’s the way that I want it to stay, and I always want to be that way for my Lola.” Doesn’t sound anti-trans to me.
I mean, don’t ask me for a sweater or an Afghan, because I cannot make things out of yarn. But I am a knitter. By which I mean that I think I have a very relational brain. The old girl is always looking for how things relate to each other.
Which brings me to a new song that I heard a snippet of in a Facebook post, and I knew, as soon as I heard the snippet, that it was for me, and I loved it. It turns out, that I figured out (lots of outs!) over the last few days, that everybody loves it, and that’s okay, because it’s great. Everybody loves it, and I love it too, and, last night, in my sleep, my brain knitted it irrevocably to another song that I (but not everybody) also love.
Song #1: The New Song “I Just Might” by Bruno Mars
Oh sweet lord Bruno Mars. If you don’t love Bruno Mars, well I don’t even know. You must be a grumpy AF old white guy, that’s the only option. Or my mother, lol, but that’s a whole other story for another time. *sigh* Bruno…. Bruno brings it every single time, IMHO: the funk, the fun, the little bit of wickedly sexy. And this song also brings the “vintage.” It sounds like a song from another place in time, which isn’t the 1950s. The 1950s are probably my least favorite period in pop music since the 1850s, lol. Sure, “Duke of Earl” is a banger, but most of it is too… bland. This song from Bruno feels like the late 60s early 70s to me, so it doesn’t surprise me that my brain has knitted it to a song from Jefferson Starship, which also (because JS is made from Jefferson Airplane) spans that 60s-70s vibe.
Song #2:The Old Song “Lovely, Lovely Love” by Jefferson Starship
I was born to be a fan of Grace Slick. I mean she just embodied cool as a female performer, so I’d always been a fan of hers from the second I heard “Somebody to Love.” But this song is a Marty Balin song (RIP Marty). Marty was, I think, a romantic, and Bruno clearly is too.
Yes, when you first hear them you may be like, “What?” “Love Lovely Love” is a little bit overwrought, and it certainly does not have the pace that “I Just Might” has, but they do share a similar melody when you compare this section of “Love Lovely Love”:
Hey, why don’t you take Whatever you want from me? I’m in the mood For all the lovin’ that I can’t see. Is this for real now? Oh, I ask you now, can it be?
To this section of “I Just Might”:
Hey, Mr. DJ (Oh, oh, oh) Play a song for this pretty little lady (Oh, oh, oh) ‘Cause if she dance as good as she look right now (Oh, oh, oh) I just might, I just might make her my baby I just might make her my baby, hey
The lyrics, of “Love Lovely Love,” well Marty was definitely looking to get some, a lot, by the sounds of it. Ha! Could he put the word love in the title a little more?
And so is Bruno in many many of his songs, and that’s okay. I am still wishing uptown funk was gonna give it to me. Bruno, slide into my DMs please.
I first heard “Love Lovely Love” in a weird way. My college English teacher in the 80s was a graduate student who was, like Marty, also looking to get some, and after I met with him for the obligatory “Let’s have a conference to discuss your writing,” conference (a practice I did also for many years when I became a writing teacher, which we were all taught to do, and which was probably an ill-advised and awkward practice for everyone involved because of the intimacy it forced on teacher and student) he presented me with an “I want to get with you” mixed tape. To give you the short version, I had made the mistake of asking my teacher if the photo on his wall was Lene Lovich, and it was not, but it was Nina Hagen, and they’re not too dissimilar, and the teacher was thrilled that someone new some music beyond top-40, and he also thought I was cute, and, who knows, maybe I was, and he made me a mixed tape, which was a 1970s-1980s mating ritual that never should have gone out of style. I did not, by any stretch of the imagination, want to date this teacher, who was incredibly strange and had a blond mustache that he explained to me was groomed to emulate Fu Manchu. But that man was buying records from the UK before there was internet, when there was only college radio and moldy damp basement record stores under the El to find non-top 40 music. That teacher loved Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship, and so did I, but I had a lot less access to collecting music as my mother had put her foot down on that when I was 15, so every album I ever bought had to be smuggled in and hidden so she would not find them and throw them away. Yeah. Cultural oppression! That’s what I grew up under. Anyway, I digress, and the point here is to say that the mixed tape that man made me was the greatest freaking mixed tape I have ever had, and I wish I still had it, and also his carefully-hand-written-on-a-sheet-of-notebook-paper track listing, and one of the amazing songs on that Memorex tape was, “Love Lovely Love.” If you come from the 70s and you want to get into a girl’s pants, you could do a lot worse than Marty Balin: “It’s No Secret,” “Plastic Fantastic Lover” “Come up the Years” “With Your Love,” “Miracles,” yeah, Marty was single-minded. The teacher was not, and while some of the songs definitely were trying to woo me, many more of them were just damn good music by any aficionado’s standard, because it was, for him, probably more about crafting the perfect tape than it was laying the perfect girl. Those kinds of guys, there is no perfect girl; there is only the perfect girl in that moment. Mixed tapes were always more about the guy than the girl the guys gave them to, but they were awesome.
Music is awesome. Marty Balin was awesome. Bruno Mars is a wonder, and sexy, and fun.
I have to wake up my daughter for school, so I’m going to go play a song for that pretty little lady. Who will not want to hear it, and who will not enjoy her mother’s eclectic taste in music (she likes Vocaloid! Lord save us!) And who will, someday, play me an old, old song by this creaky band called Jefferson Starship that the guy trying to get with her will have played for her, and she will play it for me, and it will all come around full circle. I hope.
Dianne Pearce Writes 