Kinks - Arthur or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire

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Free Music Notes for Arthur or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire

Free Music Review: decline and fall...begins to sound familiar somehow.
Hit: 5 Stars

"Arthur," unlike most other English rock albums of the day, is about real people in the real England of 1969. Not paisley hippies wearing swirly frocks, but the people that Ray Davies knew and grew up with, the people who get up and go to work each day and keep things running while the swirly-frock people twitter and glitter.

Rock music in 1969 was all about escaping, either escaping through fantasy and drugs (the Who) or through sex and drugs (The Rolling Stones) or through just being rich, arty and drugged up enough to avoid having to deal with reality at all (The Beatles). The Kinks' "Arthur" is the absolute antithesis of all that was going on in pop music in 1969, and as a result it was almost inevitable that people wouldn't understand.

Too bad for them. Ray Davies' songwriting is at its absolute best here. He is an acute observer of the human condition. He might make gentle fun of the ordinary guy who buys a hat like Anthony Eden "because it makes him feel like a lord," but he is never cruel or vindictive toward the ordinary people who make up the landscape of "Arthur." Davies is not afraid to excoriate the rich and powerful who take advantage of the Arthurs of the world, as he does in "Yes Sir No Sir," and "Brainwashed," but he's never a doctrinaire revolutionary, as so many rockers were in those days.

Davies also has something that most of his songwriting contemporaries lacked: compassion. This album is loaded with the idea that you have to cut people some slack, that you have to understand them and love them the way they are. No matter how difficult things are, family is family, and in order to make it work you have to make allowances for people, and try to do the best you can for each other. That's the underlying message of "Arthur," and it's more effective than a million "All You Need Is Love" chants, in the long run.

Oh yeah: this album rocks, too. Dave Davies is truly brilliant here; "Arthur" is a shining moment for him. His fills, his riffing, his leads, his singing: all are dead-on perfect. John Dalton, who joined the band on bass after the accident-prone and road-burnt Pete Quaife left, continues the tradition that the Kinks had of hiring butt-kicking bass players, and Mick Avory drums up everything from skiffle rhythms to jazz to straight-ahead rock.

This is one of the Kinks' best albums, but more than that, it's one of the best rock albums, ever. It sounds more pointed and relevant as the years go by, instead of less. How much art can you say that about?

On the CD nerd commentary front, this Castle Communications reissue is the one to get; it's been remastered splendidly and contains a slew of extra songs. Most of the extra songs are Dave Davies' tunes, many meant for a solo album that never quite materialized. They're well worth hearing, as is the rest of this splendid album.

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