The Kinks' Artistic Breakthrough

The Kinks' sixth studio album, The Village Green Preservation Society, which originally came out in 1968, is the product of an already great band leaping into truly outstanding heights. It was an intimate, less self-conscious, more poetic statement of what became more impassioned, grand and bald in their immediately succeeding albums. Though the Kinks were outsold by fellow British bands such as the Rolling Stones and The Who, neither of those sexier bands could have made an album of such thematic and lyrical sophistication, emotional sensitivity and conceptual variety, and the aesthetic dynamics of the musical compositions themselves are a true wonder for the mind to digest. Something truly exquisite must have happened to Ray Davies and his bandmates, a eureka moment of some sort, for while such albums as the Kinks Kontroversy, Face to Face and Something Else certainly bear a proliferation of gems that point toward a steadily rising artistic development, Village Green sounds like a liberation album, every song utterly inspired and possessed of a non-commercial pop sound with a delightfully carefree spirit. Its songs run from wry folk rock to delicately rendered calypso, each deftly commingling such feelings as vintage sadness, gentle humor, the awe of the weird, and the unabashed joy in the humble creations given to everyday life.

The Village Green Preservation Society is an engaging concept album without being overtly so, and each song is an exploration of a special room in a mansion filled with a cornucopia of moods, reflections, rhythms and imagery, both lyrical and musical. It is also an autumnal album, about the baby that was getting thrown out with the bathwater in the rapidly changing times of the High Sixties, but in this album it is the glory and joy of a metaphorical Fall at its nostalgic best: the oeuvre of brightly colored leaves, the gallant celebration of precious things people carelessly throw away or "responsibly" forget as a spiritual winter looms, the faith in mysterious forces more lasting than the vapid trends that fixate people, the exuberant sense of homage to a natural simpler existence, the gently observant humor that enables a psyche to survive a subtly fading world, the illusory mesmerism of summer's golden fame compared to the natural fulfillment of family and friendship in a humbler season, the fascinating strangeness of dying summer's weird evocations, and the power of present-mindedness over inevitable fatalism to inspire a festive mood for the dance honoring the year's final harvest.

Yet this record was not their swansong, but ironically the beginning of new creative muscularity in the group that would last for four consecutive albums. That the Kinks had the misfortune to live in the long shadow of the Beatles is regrettable. And then, just as the Beatles bid adieu, swaggering Led Zeppelin stormed the barn, inadvertently keeping the Kinks from entering the fore as they deserved. Society then as now had tendencies toward monolithic tastes and fixations, but this album fortunately has continued to get pressed in new editions in the decades that have followed its mostly ignored debut, and succeeding generations have discovered that it is a lasting work of art. Moreover, it is an album that especially speaks to our own times, where the changes in society are entering another watershed, with great doubt as to what will survive of our collective culture. Now that the frenetic rattle of the Stones has finally quietened and the colorful fog of the Beatles has finally cleared, true music lovers may finally see and discover in retrospect the fantastic work of those bands who were their equally talented peers and contemporaries -- and most especially, The Kinks.