Muswell Hillbillies

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Album Review: After “Lola” and its accompanying album (1970’s Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One,), The Kinks had a good deal of bargaining power: the single took the world by storm and became one of their best-known songs, and while the album wasn’t quite as successful, it performed well enough that the band signed a new record deal on RCA. The Kinks first album for their new label, Muswell Hillbillies, is often cited as one of their strongest LPs, and was also the beginning of their musical shift away from the “Englishness” of their classic era ( Something Else, The Village Green Preservation Society, Arthur, etc.) to a more eclectic range of influences. Universal’s new deluxe edition adds a whole second disc worth of bonus material, and while it may not be essential for the casual fan, Kinks konnoisseurs will find plenty to get excited about.

On the 50th anniversary of the Kinks’ classic album Muswell Hillbillies, the time has come to appreciate the unique genius of Ray Davies’ political vision. Released in 1971, The Kinks' 10th studio album Muswell Hillbillies featured pictures shot in The Archway Tavern. The band reissue a deluxe edition on September 9 remastered from original tapes, with rare photos and new remixes (Image: Marketing Mix/BMG Rights Management)What's a Muswell Hillbilly? Well, Muswell Hill was a community in England that the Davies family had to move to after their neighborhood in North London was razed and gentrified. You do the math, kiddo. Muswell Hillbillies’ and ‘Everybody’s In Show-Biz’ original albums remastered in gatefold wallets, with original artwork. The album resonates not because it easily fits into a political tribe but because it lays the blame for societal collapse at the feet of all, liberal and conservative alike. Mechanistic thinking that ignores the profound effects of change on actual people are the target of Davies’ political ire, not any single party. Slaughter, Matthew (4 October 2013). "Muswell Hillbillies (reissue)". Drowned In Sound. Archived from the original on 23 April 2015 . Retrieved 31 December 2014.

Larkin, Colin (2007). Encyclopedia of Popular Music (4thed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195313734. Dave Davies commented on the song, "There's that love and fondness for Americana and for country music because I had quite a big family, and all the great films like South Pacific and Oklahoma! – all these influences from the States – were embedded in our culture when growing up. It was kind of like a London version of The Beverly Hillbillies in a humorous way." [2] Release [ edit ] Dave Davies (Ray’s younger brother) takes issue with such understandings of the band’s politics. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Davies rejects the label “conservative” (used by Pete Townshend in a reflection on Village Green). In response to the word “conservatism”, Davies says, “I think it was ‘values’ more than conservatism. My father was a socialist — very left — and I was brought up to be that way. You can still be far-left and have values.”Whatever the trends and changes in direction, these are two excellent albums with excellently crafted songs, overlooked criminally at the time.

The album’s penultimate song, “Uncle Son”, captures the true political concern of the record: the unexceptional person just trying to live an authentic life amid political, economic, and social machinery. “Liberals dream of equal rights / Conservatives live in a world gone by / Socialists preach of a promised land / But old Uncle Son was an ordinary man.” Muswell Hillbillies laments the toll our struggle forward has on the liberty of individuals along the way. Promoting his recent Americanaproject in an insightful interview with The Quietus, Ray Davies sums up his uncomfortable politics succinctly: “I haven’t found a political party that adequately expresses how I feel about the world. My dad was a working-class socialist, but as a person . . . I just don’t want people in shops to have to sell their businesses. I don’t know what that makes me.” In these lines, one hears clear echoes of the 1968 song “Village Green”, in which the singer laments, “I miss the village green / and all the simple people.” In the body politic, Davies was far more interested in the body than the politic. But come 1971, were the Kinks still relevant? Well, yes. Not just because of their legacy, but 71’s Muswell Hillbillies was an excellent and widely acclaimed album. Sold sod all at the time, but a damn fine release all the same. The following year’s Everybody’s In Show Business maybe a little less so, as it saw a change in the song writing direction, which would become more theatrical and vaudevillian. Original artwork for the Muswell Hillbillies album is included in a deluxe release (Image: Marketing Mix/BMG Rights Management) This enigmatic quality has served their legacy well. By ignoring fashions and trends, the Kinks forged a body of work that is an enduring paradox: so out-of-step with its time it’s timeless. The quirky, theatrical, and oh-so British Kinks albums of the late 1960s and early 1970s remain much more contemporary and interesting than much of the popular music from their contemporaries.My eldest sister, Rosie, brought me up. It’s a song about her going to work in a factory, and her way of escaping was the movies. No Nintendo. No PlayStation. No apps in those days. Rosie’s escape was the movies. I used her as a springboard and then I drifted off into my own world. As she walks to the corner shop, she’s “walking on the surrey with the fringe on top”. “The Surrey With The Fringe On Top” is a song from Oklahoma!. It’s the song that my other sister, Rene, was dancing to [at the Lyceum in 1957] when she died. A lot of inner messages are linked into the words. Only people who know me would fully understand them. The album opens with the nightmarish “20th Century Man”, which could just as easily be called “21st Century Man”. The opening lines set the tone for the rest of the album while also giving the record a unique timeliness: “This is the age of machinery / A mechanical nightmare.” Like Kafka did 50 years before him, Ray Davies locates the primary threat to liberty not in a particular political ideology but in the mechanization of life, transforming people into cogs for the machinery. The album was not a commercial success (it failed to chart in the United Kingdom and peaked at #100 in the U.S. [10]), and its sales were a disappointment following the success of Lola the previous year. Stereo Review magazine called the poor-selling record "album of the year" in 1972 (even though it was released on 24 November 1971). In the 1984 Rolling Stone Album Guide, Rolling Stone editors gave the album five stars out of five and called it Davies' "signature statement" as a songwriter. In a retrospective review for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine called the album a wide-ranging collection of Ray Davies compositions which focus on the tensions and frustrations of modern life. [2] Re-releases [ edit ] Everybody’s In Show-Biz opener Here Comes Another Day is a definite shift, a bigger production with keyboards and brass. Likewise You Don’t Know My Name is a bright and uplifting song with layers, piano and lot of additional touches.