The Kinks

In the rock genre, I think I would say that my three favorite bands are the Grateful Dead, the Ramones, and the Kinks. The case of the Kinks is more difficult than the other two--I could give somewhat objective reasons why the former two are among the very few greatest rock bands, but in the case of the Kinks I'd be hard pressed to say they are superior to the Beatles, for instance (I made a case for the Ramones being in the same league as the Beatles in a previous post. I'd make the words "previous post" a link if I knew how to do so).

If we compare a Kinks album from 1967, Something Else, to Sgt. Pepper of the same year, we'd have to say that, while the high points of the Kinks' album match or surpass the high points of Sgt. Pepper, the minor songs on the former are not of the same quality as the minor songs on the latter (however much I may like them). But I'm not sure that is the truest criterion; anyway, I can say I like the Kinks more than I like the Beatles.

Part of it is Ray Davies' singing, and Dave Davies' harmonies; part of it is the songwriting, and the rest I am not sure of.

The two early Kinks singles, "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night," present a picture of the band that isn't really sustained beyond these songs, not in the rest of their LP material from the time and certainly not in their later work. But the combination of a raucous, distorted guitar riff and Ray Davies' unsure, almost hesitating, jerky and self-effacing vocal delivery does display the essence of the Kinks in a very concentrated way, even if that exact formula was soon abandoned.

I think the Kinks are a kind of band one comes to love for different reasons than one has for loving the Beatles; there's a certain insistence on minor pleasures and a less triumphalist feel to the whole thing. Even the name, the Kinks, seems to suggest a shadowy and maginalized perspective, as well as a crooked path taken.