Love: Gather Round [1969]
The Kinks: Apeman [1970]
Two from the years '69-'70 which I like because they serve as good if odd transitional songs. Set somewhere after the summer of love but before the summer of sam, sometime after Woodstock but before stagflation, released on either side of Altamont. Together they show man the hubristic animal, skepticism towards success and progress, urbanism and its discontents, and an alienation from both reality and ideal. The Kinks (from Lola Versus Powerman) retreat to kind of fantasy in witty exasperation: “So I’m no better than the animals sitting in their cages in the zoo man / cos compared to the flowers and the birds and the trees, I am an ape man.” Love (from Out Here), on the other hand, take a more somber, enigmatic, and confrontational approach: “I'm gonna tell another story bout an animal called man / Well he struts all around with his tailor made suits / But his mind is all filled up with bullshit.”
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3 comments:
You can also hear some uncanny foreshadowings of stagflation in both songs. So prescient.
I expect Sheridan's next song will be "Tiny Dancer," a song obviously written about the emotional effects stagflation has on ordinary people.
I look out dee window
But I can't see dee sky...
Dee stag-flation
Is a-fuckin' up my eye
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