This Is Your Song For....March 13th, 2014: Break Them Down by Graham Parker

Hiding behind a not very good album....

Welcome back.  Hopefully I can get up enough energy to submit these entries more than monthly soon.  Today...the Angry Young Man of New Wave most people forgot.

....which is a shame because if you consider Joe Jackson The Beatles, and Elvis Costello The Stones, then Graham Parker is The Kinks, the one that helped shape the genre while not getting the credit his peers deserved.  And let’s be honest; like The Kinks, Parker had a tendency towards inconsistency and an annoying habit of trying to chase the American market instead of being true to himself.

This is from a later phase in his career, after he broke ties with his most famous collaborators The Rumor, and was recording as Graham Parker And The Shot (this being the only album he records under that name).  This is a very transparent song about converting native cultures to Christianity and, while it’s not as unsubtle as ‘Green Monkeys,’ a song off the otherwise excellent,return-to-form album Struck By Lightning, it’s pretty obvious what Parker is getting at.  It’s sort of a sad period of his career, when he was flailing about trying to keep an audience that was growing bored with him.  It’s not for nothing that Parker never quite found another sympatico set of collaborators thoughout the late 80‘s onward until he recently reunited with The Rumor for the rather good Three Chords Good.

As you can no doubt tell, I don’t have much to say about this song.  If Graham Parker is The Kinks, then this is from the period in his career analogous to the late 70‘s era that saw Ray Davies produce Low Budget and Celluloid Heroes.

Here’s the song.

36 Songs, 36 Days (2012 Edition), Day Twenty Four: No One Listens by Ray Davies

"Now where did I put my creativity?"

Ahhhhh, Ray Davies. A personage I sometimes love deeply, and sometimes I look upon as the 60's version of Alex Aleakis.

And there's no denying whatsoever the role Ray Davies has in the history of rock music. His band The Kinks should rightfully be considered part of the Holy Trinity of 60's Britpop, and should be looked upon as one of the Grandfathers of my beloved power pop. When he's good--large chunks of Kontraversy, Something Else, Village Green, Arthur, that 80's revival of interest heralded by State of Confusion and the highly underrated Word of Mouth--there is simply no one as good a songwriter as Davies....

However, the sad thing is that the bulk of Davies' work is at its best lazy and at its worse downright, cringe-inducing awful. The smirking obviousness of Low Budget and Muswell Hillbillies, the imitativeness of Destroyer, even the downright radio baiting of Think Visual paints a picture of Davies' muse as fickle, callous and even cruel in its reduction of his vision. I sometimes wonder if Ray needed the out and out hostility of his brother Dave (or, during the 80's, his similarly conflicted romance with Chrissie Hynes, the disintegration of which led to both the adorementioned Word of Mouth and his first solo album, Return To Waterloo) to keep his tendency to muse on English cliches and obvious wordplay in check and drive him to greater heights...because when he's on his own, Ray Davies can frequently fall into a rut. Witness how, of the albums that are considered his post-Kinks solo career, four of the six albums are either composed whole or in part of previously released, reworked Kinks material.

This is from Davies' last solo album composed of original songs, 2007's Working Man's Cafe, and--unlike many of the other tracks on this otherwise middling-to-okay album--it's indicative of the obvious, imitative part of Davies' brain. It's one of an increasingly large body of songs by older rockers railing at the increasingly digitized world, and it's....not very insightful. While it mines the themes of alienation that Davies has found gold in before, there's none of the wonderful wordplay and sarcasm that makes Davies a rock maven here. Instead, it's a crotchety guy complaining that because we're so dependant on computers, no one listens to him. I find it fascinating how Davies cites a lot of older forms of communication--writing to City Hall, calling authorities--and then whines that the breakdown of new technologies results in no one listening to him, his complaints stuck in the system. Even the melody seems tired, as if it was slightly tweaked from a previous Kinks composition...from the 60's, naturally, since it'll evoke warm fuzzies of nostalgia from us older fans while seeming coolly retro to the newer fans.

Since the release of Working Man's Cafe, Davies has released an album composed of choral arrangements of Kinks classics and the true kiss of creative death, an album where he re-recorded Kinks classics with a selection of modern, new artists like Mumford and Sons to prove how 'with it' and 'influential' he was. And the ironic thing is how if he hadn't dove into the same 'see, we mattered' pool that Art Aleakis has been swimming in, his reputation might have improved--instead of having it tarnished with the crappy green fakey-gold patina of greed, opportunism and desperation.

I love Ray Davies, and will always honor his songwriting talents for what they were and for the way he helped shape power pop. But stuff like this makes me want to scream at him. It's a dichotomy I have grown to live with.

Here's the song in the popular 'shot of the album cover' format....