lyrics = poetry? god save the kinks!

not just for Stan! 🙂

The New York Times March 5, 2008

Ray Davies, Rock Poet?

By Barry Gewen
The Kinks

Can rock lyrics (or pop music lyrics like those of Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart) be considered poetry? I was reminded of this late-night, dorm-room, bull-session question by a recent Talk of the Town item in The New Yorker in which the writer Nick Paumgarten followed Ray Davies around the Upper West Side while he reminisced about his years in New York.

Davies was the leader and core figure of the Kinks, one of the top bands (along with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who) of the ’60s British invasion. There were always two aspects to the Kinks’ work. One was its proto-punk sound (“All Day and All of the Night,” “You Really Got Me”). The other was its mood of elegiac lamentation for an older England. The first is what made the Kinks a top-40 band, but it’s the second that raises the question of rock poetry.

Davies’s words, I think, can make a claim on our attention beyond those of the other British bands (yes, even Lennon-McCartney) for a couple of reasons. There is, for one thing, the careful, craftsman’s attention to quotidian detail. When George Orwell celebrated England during the depths of World War II, he didn’t reach for the sunshine patriot’s abstract symbols of God, King and Country, but for the daily realities of suet pudding, heavy coins, bad teeth and old maids riding bicycles. That was the true England for him, the one worth caring about, the one ordinary people fought and died for. Similarly, Davies’s England consists of little shops, strawberry jam, Tudor houses, Sunday roast beef and millions of people swarming like flies around the Waterloo underground station. It’s a specificity that, like Orwell’s, bespeaks a humane, empathetic sensibility. The Beatles’ “Penny Lane” could fit comfortably into the Davies oeuvre with its barber, fireman and pretty nurse selling poppies from a tray — except for the larky “And though she feels as if she’s in a play/She is anyway.”

Davies is never larky. His tone is consistently one of ruefulness and disappointment, nostalgia tinged with sentimentality. The England he loves, the authentic, grounded England, is fast disappearing, to be replaced by estate housing, plastic men and phony followers of fashion. It’s important to add that Davies is not any kind of green. He’s thoroughly urban. A parking lot doesn’t pave paradise, it replaces a supermarket; a bowling alley supplants the local dance hall where his sister used to go. What he laments is not civilization destroying nature, but a lesser form of civilization swallowing up a superior form.

There’s a unity to this vision, which is to say that Davies has a genuine voice. He is an auteur. (Undoubtedly, part of the reason for this is that the Kinks, far more than any other British-invasion band, were the vehicle for one man. Can anyone name the band’s bass player without looking it up?*)

But even if Davies is an auteur, are his lyrics poetry? I confess that I’m not convinced. As with almost all song lyrics, I don’t think his words can stand alone on the page; they need the music they were designed to accompany. You can’t recite them; you have to sing them. Yes, yes, I know that ancient bards sang their words, and that Homer probably did too, and that the respected scholar Christopher Ricks has written an entire book arguing that Bob Dylan is the great poet of our time. And I’m also sure that just about everyone has a favored exception to this stand-alone rule (something by Leonard Cohen? Smokey Robinson? Johnny Mercer?), and if you gathered them all up, you could fill a hefty, admirable volume. There’s a great deal to be said on both sides of this question. Which is why those bull sessions last long into the night.

*It’s Pete Quaife.