THE KINKS
Lola vs. Powerman & the Moneygoround, Part One (1970)
Pye/Reprise
Produced by RAY DAVIES

Ray Davies sounds angry, and he has every right to be. Not legendary and not classic, LOLA VS. POWERMAN nonethless sounds like a greatest-hits compilation, not for the '60s but for the decade to follow. In his last pop hurrah, Davies was prolific and ahead of his time. In these mostly flawless compositions he anticipates the band's subsequent years of cult entity. Nothing the Kinks did in the remainder of the '70s lacks a forerunner on this disc, and it's their last great record because it sums up everything they would do afterward.

Maybe the anti-publisher rants of "Denmark Street" are strained, but I'd rather rock stars display irritation than complacency. Cynicism is the order of the day. The '60s are over and Davies was never a part of the '60s anyway. If anything, on "The Contenders" and "Get Back in the Line" he seems to have grown into his skin, poised more than ever to burst on his own terms into the mainstream, but many of the sweet promises of this LP were never fulfilled.

The single "Lola" is as brilliant as it's reputed to be, adjusting all precedent of sexual roleplaying to create something teasing and, in many ways, unheard-of, especially adorned by his so-damn-British boyish voice. What matters is that it features Davies' best, funniest, and most provocative lyrics and one of his most sincerely excellent melodies. The other hit "Apeman," of course, is more conservative, by which I mean more disgusted by the world, by which I mean more liberal, because that's how it works. No matter what anybody says, he does say "fucking," and it's so well-placed it alone makes the dandy novelty track (at least three times better than "Yellow Submarine") worth hearing a million times.

It's ironic, maybe or maybe not, that the most commercial success the Kinks had in years came from the record on which they finally rejected the music industry entirely. Previous expressions of sarcasm like "Session Man" off FACE TO FACE had been pointless filler; "Top of the Pops," which recasts the same album's opening seconds, is passionate. "The Contenders" has the Kinks' loudest, most blatant riffage in ages, but it sounds tiny next to "Pops," a song that slides as far away from "Drivin'" and "Shangri La" as possible in ruthlessness, stinging musically and attacking with true gusto the press, the label, and the band's peers. It's the last day of school and they'll let you know what they think. The band's answer to news of a #1 hit is nothing more or less than devastatingly funny, leading us straight to side two.

LOLA doesn't really move the Kinks forward, it's a flashback to British Invasion early days despite its insistent debunking of the myths surrounding the revolution that eventually left them behind. These nuggets are brief -- "The Moneygoround" goes on for less than two minutes -- and loud and fast, but so self-referential that the 1970 context is clear as day. "Moneygoround" hops along with trials and tribulations of fame and wealth; to his credit, Ray sounds incredibly carefree while he fires shots at people making money off his music who "Don't know the tune and they don't know the words / But they don't give a damn." As Dave Davies sings on another engaging all-out rocker, "There's rats in every direction."

It might be hard to recommend this LP to someone unfamiliar with the Kinks, as much as it relies on recasting the haze around glory days. But the lovely piano-driven "This Time Tomorrow" ("I don't know where I'm going / I don't want to see") is a beauty in any context, as is the VILLAGE GREEN throwback "A Long Way from Home," and they sit well with the poignance of the jobless angst of "Get Back in the Line" ("Facing the world ain't easy") or the stomping "Strangers." When the lyrics get murky, the Kinks pick the song up and run with it through their relentlessly accessible playing power, and it's maybe the last time their music was this infectious until they signed to Arista in the mid-'70s.

The overlong (4:17) "Powerman" goes too far in the wrong direction toward trite and although the band compensates, Davies seems too obsessed with his own convictions and ends up sounding silly and -- now -- dated, while "Got to Be Free" sounds today as sincere as "All You Need Is Love," which is to say, not at all. It says everything you want to hear but has nothing to tell you. Fuck all that; the rallying cry at the close of "The Moneygoround" may be the point of the record and the key to its connection with an audience. After being stripped of friends, money, success, power, complacency one by one, Ray Davies simply wails: "I'll survive!" Whatever the means to the end, it's a universal message... and he'd be searching for its reassurance desperately on MUSWELL HILLBILLIES.