The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968)
Pye/Reprise
Produced by RAY DAVIES

"A bore is a straightliner who finds the wealth in division." VILLAGE GREEN PRESERVATION SOCIETY is a major landmark in rock history. It's the Kinks' best album, for one thing, and for another it's the ultimate rejection (at just the right time) of the values of its genre, of the elements that had taken the music industry captive. It's no wonder the Kinks were shunned in the U.S.; this album casts a stinging, sardonic pall over the idealism of the San Francisco groups. The Velvet Underground never stated their opposition to anything in their music, it was all implied. The Kinks therefore offer a more potent kind of late-'60s social criticism, which at the same time is subtler than the Sex Pistols' rallying cries.

The band finds strength in their quiet, textured music on this album, and they have all but abandoned commercial interests for stark, satirical humanist edge that transcends the band's previous similar material, in the vein of "A Well Respected Man," "Dedicated Follower of Fashion," and "Dandy." In the title track they proclaim a desire for a return to simpler times; it's funny, but like most of the Kinks' work, also aching. There's a genuine sense of loss in Ray Davies' work. You get the impression that in the ways that most rock stars had always had an immediacy, Davies had the internal context of retrospect, always looking backward more than forward, always in his songwriting studying less grand and obvious and more deeply complex emotions.

It's not sheer nostalgia that marks Davies' work. There's bitterness, anger here that defies the whispering execution of the songs. "Do You Remember Walter?" is genuinely hurt by the title character's subtle betrayal. The same for the urgent "Big Sky," a slice of steaming desperation. On songs in which the power is more controlled, Davies' visions are still never simple: "Starstruck" is one of the most sophisticated cuts of the decade, and work like the shimmering "Sitting by the Riverside," "Last of the Steam-Powered Trains," and "Phenomenal Cat" traces the Kinks' eclectic musical abilities without strain.

Davies' concerns were hard for the Americans of their time to accept. His David Byrnesque obsession with "pictures" on two songs (one of them blatantly stolen and destroyed by the no-talent fucking shitheads Green Day a few decades later) marks him as far ahead of his time. "Animal Farm" and "Village Green" explore themes foreign to every other band I can think of from the '60s, and the latter has a hysterically funny jab at U.S. tourists. It is not for nothing that the Kinks are called the most unapologetically British band of all. Davies is venting fully, he's not holding back anything to ensure his place in the mainstream. This is his most passionate creation.

If the album slows down toward the end, it doesn't keep it from feeling like an adventure worth taking again. My hope is that today's audiences, more worldly and savvy than those of the '60s, have the intelligence and patience to bask in the lyrical qualities of the Kink's music, to study that dignified veneer and rip it away until the raw emotion comes through. Maybe at last, VILLAGE GREEN's time has arrived. It's been waiting.