Ray Davies: 'Silent Movies' and 'Rock'n'Roll Cowboys' from 'Americana' LP.
‘Americana’ is a record riddled with cliches and nostalgia, but when was a Ray Davies record anything else? Long-time Unpopular readers (there may even be one or two of you who remember the halcyon days of Tangents. Anyone? Oh well…) will know well that Davies is in my top flight of artists, regularly topping out the list at those moments when guns are held to temples. He may well be the epitome of the curmudgeonly old man spouting dubious political views, but gosh darn it, I have thoroughly enjoyed listening to ‘Americana’ this year. Anyone criticising this record as being one-dimensional or of lacking the finesse required to properly reflect the complexities of contemporary America would be, I suspect, wilfully missing the point of the record in the first place. For Davies has never really been one for addressing complexities; has always recognised that Pop as essentially a short-form medium is really not best placed to do this. Instead Davies’ records have always relished in knowingly mediated tableau and I would aver that ‘Americana’ is thus firmly in the tradition of ‘Village Green’ in being a warm-hearted, intensely personal but essentially theatrical vision of place that exists primarily within other mediated experiences of those same countries. So if ‘Village Green’ is Constable and Coleridge then ‘Americana’ is Roy Rogers and Lichtenstein’s comic book heroines.
Nowhere is it finer that in the gorgeous sequence of ‘Silent Movie’ into ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Cowboys’ wherein Davies remembers a conversation with Alex Chilton and proceeds to sing about the notion of rock’n’roll singers as cowboys. Not as *real* cowboys, you understand, but those of the silver screen and the gun-slinging Elvis of Warhol’s silk. Davies resignedly accepts that the Golden Age of the rock’n’roll singer is now as much a historical punctuation mark in the tapestry of Popular culture as Will Eisner and Jack Binder, Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels. No more and no less.
Rock’n’roll, Davies seems to say, is no longer Rock’n’Roll in much the same way as the Western is no longer The Western. Threads may remain and the form vaguely recognisable, but the detail is different, themes sometimes gleefully inverted and perverted. And whilst Davies laments this he simultaneously grudgingly accepts that this is the way it is. He may grump about how Things Were Better In The Good Old Days, but the sadness is underpinned by the knowledge that his nostalgia is, as it has always been, just smoke and mirrors.
Yes to Tangents! And yes to Ray Davies!
Posted by: Trisha | December 02, 2017 at 17:19
Hurrah! Thanks Trisha.
Posted by: Me | December 02, 2017 at 18:46