Twee Magazine

The Kinks.

The Kinks sometimes seem like they were proto-everything. Punk borrowed the band's snarl, Heavy Metal lifted the power chords, New Wave and power pop stole The Kink's superlative sense of melody, and Britpop repackaged all of it. There's probably an Ottoman classical group that, if you pulled them aside, would confess that their primary influence is The Kinks.

So we're going to go ahead and claim them too, as the spiritual godfathers of twee. And with good cause. It's not just that Wes Anderson originally wanted the soundtrack to "Rushmore" to be entirely Kinks songs. Neither is is just that Belle and Sebastian regularly cover "You Really Got Me" and "Victoria" in live performance. Nor is it just that Miranda July said of "The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society" that "Big Sky is the song of the album, the one that makes me proud to be human." It's not just that the Kinks seem to be a constituent part of the DNA of modern twee artists, one of the proteins that form their building blocks.

It's that the songwriting of the Davis brother, especially Ray, often was laced with nostalgia and whimsy. It's that even their most lacerating songs were simultaneously obsessed with style. It's that The Kinks often told little baroque fairytales about lost, tweedy men and women, eccentrically pursuing very British passions.

Here, then, are some of The Kinks tweest songs, representing just the first two years of the recoding career, from 1964's "The Kinks" to 1966's "Face to Face." We will look at their later years in another post, or perhaps several, because, frankly, the band produced a lot of material that fits our bill.

1. "Nothin' in the World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl" 


We're skipping the first Kinks album, their self-titled 1964 debut. Although that collection features some exceptional songwriting -- especially with "You Really Got Me" and "Stop Your Sobbing" -- the album represents The Kinks largely as raucous and sneering. It isn't until their second album, "Kinda Kinks" from 1965, that the songwriting started to show the eccentric folksiness and introspection that would later characterize much of Ray Davies songwriting.

Over a thrumming, bluesy acoustic guitar pattern, Ray Davis sings gently about betrayal. The song was featured on the "Rushmore" soundtrack during a pool party sequence that was meant to visually evoke "The Graduate," and the song echoes the use of Simon and Garfunkle in that film. But the scene features a sodden, put-upon Bill Murray and signals an more world-weary sensibility. It's a lovely, haunted song, and looks forward to the sort of music Nick Drake and Cat Stephens would later produce.

2. "Ev'rybody's Gonna Be Happy"


A propulsive, Merseybeat-inspired pop classic,with preposterous lyrical optimism, coupled with joyous handclaps.It's the sort of song that mod youths in 60s film would run through the streets of London to, occasionally leaping into the air. Although the song broke an amazing string of number one singles in England (the previous 12 releases had all topped the charts), the song is an example of just how good The Kinks were at writing pop songs. It's the song that every 90s indie pop release aspired to be.

3. "Dedicated Follower of Fashion"


Ray Davies had a well-earned reputation for prickliness, which he had deployed in song against women he felt had wronged him and onstage against his brother. But with "Dedicated Follower of Fashion," he took aim at the burgeoning 60s fashion scene in London, which featured outrageous mock-Edwardian styles and much of it centered around Carnaby Street, namechecked in the song as producing a "Carnabetian army" of frilly, feminine, empty-headed dandies.

Davies claimed the song was inspired by an argument he had at a party with a fashion designer, in which he argued that one should simply be true to one's self, and the world would change around you. But the song triggered a crisis in Davies, first as fashionable audiences adopted the song as a celebration, instead of a criticism, and secondly as Davies began to feel his own self-assurance sliding away, leading to a crack-up in the next year. Dabies reportedly still does not like this song.

Nonetheless, it represents a shift toward a style of songwriting that Davies would mine brilliantly in the future, borrowing from the English music hall, which feels the right choice for a song about modern-day Oscar Wildes.

4. "A Well-Respected Man"


Another sample of Ray Davies' music hall sensibilities coupled with his lacerating wit, "A Well-Respected Man" is a look into an insular, well-regulated, deeply conservative world that is rife with pettiness and corruption. There has been a bit of confusion about the song, the result of the line "And he likes his fags the best," which Americans interpreted as a suggestion of homosexuality. There is a bit of ambiguity to it, but the word has a different meaning in English. There, it is either a cigarette, which superficially is the most likely meaning. But "fagging" is also a boarding school tradition of bullying, in which younger boys act as personal servants to older ones, and Davies has said he wanted to suggest this as well.

Davies deliberately selected a simple, endlessly repetitive descending melody, the sort of thing often dismissed as twee, to represent the smallness of the world of the song. But Davies' sense of melody is so superb, and the chorus sounds so buoyant, that it is possible simply to respond to the song's superficial charms and miss that it was written with acid, as happened with "Dedicated Follower of Fashion." The song appeared on the soundtrack to "Juno," but there it felt more like a bid to give the film indie credibility than a commentary on the content.

5. "I'm On an Island"


Over a Spanish-style guitar pattern and Liberace-sumptuous piano, Ray Davies sings a tropical-themed song with deliberately inane lyrics. Davies starts singing in a cheerfully weak style, but becomes increasingly unhinged sounding as the song continues. Included because it sounds like a test-run for Jonathan Richman's entire career.

6. "Rosie Won't You Please Come Home"


Pretty much any song from The Kink's 1966 album "Face to Face" could be on this list, as virtually every song features baroque piano fills, jangling guitars, and childlike lyrics. But we'll start with "Rosie Won't You Please Come Home," the most anguished song on the album.

The song was inspired by Rosie Davies, sister of Ray and Dave, marrying and moving to Australia, a fact that so deeply upset Ray that he would eventually use it as inspiration for an entire album "Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)." As a result, there's a frantic, infantile quality to the song, much of it sung over a chattering baroque harpsichord, with the pleading chorus sung over a fuzzed out bass line, as though the emotional pain of separation had actually cause Davies to go into a psychedelic fugue state.

The narrator of the song seems to be very young. He complains about Rosie's absence as upsetting mother, ruining Christmas, and promises if she returns he will bake a cake. It's a though a 10-year-old were given a chance to write a song with The Strawberry Alarm Clock, and made the most of the opportunity.

7. "Rainy Day in June"


I don't have the space here to make the case that spooky folk rock is inherently twee, but it's a subject I will return to. I will, however, point out that "Rainy Day in June" manages to combine a laconic, haunted pastoral melody over strummed guitar with lyrics about elves and gnomes, coupled with a chorus that sounds a bit like what cult members might sing at a summer camp. I'd like to imagine that Jimmy Page heard this song and decided that, god damn it all, he was going to sing about hobbits if he chose to.