Better Things. The Kinks. 1981. Arista.

 The resurgence in popularity clinched by the Kinks in the nineteen-eighties was a gift to the record buying public we largely have consumers of media to thank for. It began with me in the summer of 1980, when I was collecting singles, and Arista released Lola/Celluloid Heroes from the double live LP, One For The Road. My introduction to Celluloid Heroes was an engrossing experience that called for the record’s repeated plays. What I found remarkable about the song, apart from the diaphanous beauty of Ray Davies’ delicate singing voice, is his gift for lyrical beauty, simultaneously mythologizing the old Hollywood guard beyond our reach while rendering it like a menagerie of flayed animals in its desperate humanity. The following year Arista released Give The People What They Want, which featured the radio success Destroyer, whose themes of mental stress and paranoia resonated Stateside during the first Reagan administration. The second single from that LP, the group’s nineteenth studio record, was released three months later. I reject the term “life-affirming,” if only because it sounds like an inane Christian marketing concept; “the life-affirming vision of Christ and his crushed lungs nailed to the Cross….” Some of pop history’s greatest singles unabashedly tap into the power of good cheer. Tutti Frutti. Dancing Queen. Private Idaho. Better Things. But Davies, typically, goes even further than to merely replicate the energy of good cheer. He dares you to experience it. One of the finest imaginative minds of modern pop, responsible for masterworks whose titles speak for themselves—You Really Got Me, David Watts, The Village Green Preservation Society, Shangri-La (the will to produce such a songbook as the Davies brothers’ is what can be described as “life-affirming,” and even then, especially with regard to work as vital as theirs is, it should go without saying)—reaches out to his listenership to sing optimistically, invigoratingly, of the force of good will, and the best the States could do in return for his band was to send the single to #92 on the Billboard Hot 100. What was number 1 the week following the release of Better Things? That paean to the successful marketing trend of aerobic exercise, Physical by Olivia Newton John. Better Things captures, without irony, the thrill of the bond that is passed between friends and lovers over the shared excitement of the rock and roll experience, and wishing that continued joy throughout your years no matter the time passed between you and it. It’s a tempest of glad tidings from a beloved pop genius shot from the marketing vacuum that was the tail end of that grand cultural experiment, and if it continues, somehow, to live for you, it’s a wish that your inebriation never end. The rest of us, in good or ill health, can simply replay the record of its fractured, incendiary memory.


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