Monday, January 31, 2005

Ray Davies: Science-Fiction Autobiography

I've just read a review of Ray Davies autobiography, "X-Ray: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Ray Davie," at wfmu.org that you might enjoy. This sentence pretty much sums up the review:

"'X-Ray' is a memoir wrapped in a science fiction story not unlike the hokey rock operas Davies was writing in the mid-seventies."

The Kinks really are fascinating, and I wish I understood them better. I heard "Come Dancing" at dinner on Saturday, and my dinner companions and I enjoyed it thoroughly. The fact that they could write a song that good that late in their careers is one of the things I point to in defense of the Advanced theory. It seems like the Kinks just decided to make a hit record (like David Bowie did with "Let's Dance"), so they did. I think Ray Davies could have written a hundred versions "Come Dancing" or even "Waterloo Sunset," but he prefered to challenge himself with those "hokey rock operas." Of course, they weren't "hokey," they were Advanced.

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