the kinks - lola

so i heard this on the radio the other day as part of a song contest & they played the 'coca-cola' version, was i right to be somewhat giddy about that? or is that in fact totally common?

I'm not sure.

I think "Cherry Cola" is a better line anyway.

imo Preservation/Soap Opera/Schoolboys in Disgrace is their artistic peak, Rasa was obviously holding Ray back

this song is obviously the kinks peak

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhDWvIHjU6o

The Dave tweet also had this follow up

x.com/davedavieskinks/status/1348307021989294081

― Platinum Penguin Pavilion (soref), Tuesday, March 24, 2026 6:03 AM (two days ago)

ok now i need to hear jayne county's take on geri miller

excellent final point - i know the part of the song that will always mean the most to me:

girls will be boys and boys will be girls
it's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world
Except for Lola

i'd love it have it all figured out like Lola confidently appears to.

― My homies buttthole surfers' record sounds like a f (Western® with Bacon Flavor), Monday, March 23, 2026 10:51 AM (three days ago)

lol hate to break it to you but we don't have it all figured out either (though any genderqueer people who _do_ have it all figured out are welcome to contradict me!)

All of this makes me want to hear Billy Joel in his 70s mode do something about a Long Island guy in over his head in the Village. (He sets some scenes there but without any character complexity or libido.)

― Come On, (Eazy), Monday, March 23, 2026 1:41 PM (three days ago)

billy joel? he's the guy who does the songs about lonely guys drinking together and then going home and jerking off alone, right? honestly i kind of assume half the women in his songs are dolls and his protags just don't realize it.

I mean it should be offensive to everyone but trans people are a part of everyone

― frogbs, Monday, March 23, 2026 1:52 PM (three days ago)

i'm not unsympathetic, but damn if the world isn't filled with people making things that have nothing to do with us be all about us somehow. i don't feel i need to be specifically represented at the "why moby sucks" rally, though i do appreciate the spirit of inclusiveness that inspires your invitation.

Prob due to my precise age, I heard "Yoda" before "Lola" and it will forever be the superior song to me

― well damn, Jackie, I can’t control the CIA (flamboyant goon tie included), Monday, March 23, 2026 2:03 PM (three days ago)

fgti otm

i grew up listening to '80s new york radio, i heard a lot of "lola" and "walk on the wild side" and "the low spark of high-heeled boys"... i don't know if that last one had anything to do with the other two, but in my head it did. anyway due to one of those stations i tend to _severely_ overestimate 1972-era traffic's place in the classic rock pantheon.

Thanks Kate, that was some damn fine nuancing.

― Cow_Art, Monday, March 23, 2026 2:15 PM (three days ago)

yw!

anyway moby sucks but i still like "next is the e"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJCFHw2Y5WQ

Matt Pike from Sleep/High on Fire has really strong opinions about his deep hatred for Aerosmith's 'Dude Looks Like a Lady' which is truly an execrable song

Was listening to the Who's Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy in the car today; I hope Moby doesn't set his sights on "I'm a Boy."

or god forbid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHrqEEzagVo

That crossed my mind too.

aren't they kinda making fun of their own scene in that song? 'You're always wearing skin tight pants' etc.

Scott Walker's 'Big Louise' from Scott 3 always seemed to me to be a sympathetic song even if the lyrics are not super obvious

Moby vs. Moulty...

One of the most empathetic pre-1980 songs you'll find on the subject (later covered by Wussy):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44bkhkBYrew

Dude Looks Like A Lady is about Vince Neil which redeems it somewhat

xp rasa deserved cowrite credits of like 10%-20% on at least a half dozen kinks classics. that’s a problem with band/arranger credits all across the history of pop/rock.

the idea that her absence is why 70s kinks are c or d tier is insane. would her casual suggestions to ray have salvaged preservation and schoolboys? and did ray really write that many fewer classics after 71 than lennon or mccartney or van morrison or… not sure who else to compare him to. dylan and jagger/richards fared a bit better but not by much.

if there's a post-71 Kinks album as good as Band on the Run or Veedon Fleece, I'd love to hear it

or Blood on the Tracks or Some Girls for that matter

maybe i will embark on a '70s kinks journey

ok you’re right i was underselling his peers a bit in an eruption of misplaced dudgeon strike all that part

This is fanfic but it would've been nice if Rasa had been there to tell Ray "don't make every part about a male actor about how cool they were, and every part about a female actor about how fragile they were, mix it up a bit!" in "Celluloid Heroes" (a song I nonetheless love).

Interesting to me that he dropped the verse about Marilyn Monroe when the Kinks played the song later on. Maybe he thought, after "Candie in the Wind", it was too much of a cliche.

when lennon and mccartney stopped writing together they both made worse music, john getting stuck in unproductive blind alleys and paul putting out songs which are just a lot of good bits that don't fit together well. they both needed someone to tell them "that's not working" or "that's corny"

Mal Evans used to help them too!

"Candie in the Wind" sounds like some VU/Song for Drella outtake

Candy Darling in the Wind

Candle Says

lool!

when lennon and mccartney stopped writing together they both made worse music, john getting stuck in unproductive blind alleys

― Francis Fuck Coprolalia (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Friday, March 27, 2026 4:34 AM (seven hours ago)

insert tasteless joke

Was listening to the Who's Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy in the car today; I hope Moby doesn't set his sights on "I'm a Boy."

― clemenza, Thursday, March 26, 2026 6:00 PM (yesterday)

oh jeez i'll say lola is definitely transphobic (i think it's "good bad" representation, though, like rocky horror), but no i don't read "i'm a boy" that way as well. honestly i think of "i'm a boy" in the voice of a transmasc kid always being made to wear dresses because they're a "girl". some stuff that gets read as "transphobic" i read the opposite way. for instance there's that blue jam sketch about parents who decide their child is actually a middle-aged man and treat him that way. whatever the intent is, the reason the sketch is horrific is because it's the _parents_ who are making the decisions about what they _think_ their child should be. if a child says "i'm a boy" why would a parent say "no, you have to be a girl"? the way these bigots get everything absolutely backwards is just horrifying to me.

honestly one of my niche special interests is the anti-hippie backlash and the revised narrative boomers started to tell about it. like, if you look at the primary sources, the "straights" didn't hate longhairs because long hair represented opposition to the vietnam war, they hated longhairs because guys with long hair _looked like girls_. a lot of the people at the time knew that and leaned into the genderfuck... some the bands bowie covered on "pin ups", the who and the pretty things and syd's pink floyd. bowie didn't cover them, but you can also hear stuff like the spike drivers' "baby can i wear your clothes".

i'd say "arnold layne" is... i mean it reveals the limits of even words like "transphobic". arnold layne isn't trans, he's just a guy who steals dresses off washing lines and wears them in private. "trans" is kind of a limited framing when you're talking about this stuff. regardless, it certainly takes a dim view of arnold... whatever syd _meant_ by "don't do it again", speaking as someone who used to "crossdress", it's not a stretch to interpret it as referring to layne's crossdressing. which is why i love "have you seen jackie?", the dukes of stratosphear's syd homage, so much, because it's so much more positive and affirming of a message.

god, i've seen people argue seriously that "uncorrected personality traits" is transphobic. people... younger people don't always understand the context. to me it's clearly a satire on the sort of psychiatry that gave rise to transmedicalism, particularly given that this was the guy who also wrote "sometimes i wish i was a pretty girl" and "queen elvis".

honestly of the 60s bands, i think the who were the best when it came to gender (well, excepting the velvets!). i think i've mentioned it before, but my fave song about gender the Who did was "tattoo"... it took me a while to catch on how much of a sly satire on gender essentialism "tattoo" is. after spending the whole song going on about how having a tattoo makes him a man, he casually mentions that "my wife is tattooed too"... well, maybe i'm just that thick lol

This is fanfic but it would've been nice if Rasa had been there to tell Ray "don't make every part about a male actor about how cool they were, and every part about a female actor about how fragile they were, mix it up a bit!" in "Celluloid Heroes" (a song I nonetheless love).

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf), Friday, March 27, 2026 3:23 AM (nine hours ago)

i mean at some point my fanfic started being "what if all the rock stars weren't cishet white guys" lol

there are plenty of women who could have done as well as any british public school boy, given the opportunity, which by and large they weren't! that's one of the things that makes me saddest... even though i wouldn't say i was ever a man, i do believe that i had opportunities i wouldn't have had if i was afab. :( boys just get _encouraged_ in ways that girls typically, well, don't.

whatever syd _meant_ by "don't do it again", speaking as someone who used to "crossdress", it's not a stretch to interpret it as referring to layne's crossdressing.

"Now he's caught/ a nasty sort of person"

I actually think you could argue that that part of the song onwards is about how Arnold Layne is viewed by the authorities, who send him to prison after all. "Don't do it again" is the sort of thing a judge or policeman would say.

moby hearing "lola" pop up on spotify and dropping his tea in shock reminds me of that horrible era when twitter kids discovered "baby its cold outside". (not to say it is or isnt problematic, i love all the close reading going on here, but just that i dont believe moby spent more than .0005 seconds thinking about it beyond "people from olden times were not as smart as me, a 2026 guy who has it all figured out")

there are plenty of women who could have done as well as any british public school boy

I don't think Davies had the money/family connections for public school but the rest of what you say U agree with ofc

I agree with, not U (tho presumably u do, u said it)

I don't think Davies had the money/family connections for public school

Never even went to grammar school, unlike the Beatles (Ringo aside). Apparently the Davies family were the family in your neighborhood who you're warned off associating with.

... according to Pete Quaife iirc.

"Arnold Layne"'s insistence that "it takes two to know" also prefigures asexual awareness.

Ray Davies chimes in:

"Who the fuck is Moby?"

*Ray Davies makes no public or verifiable comment

(xpost) That reminds me of something I wrote ages ago, when Eminem mentioned Moby in a song:

"Even the wildly misplaced attack on Moby is hilarious--I don't have strong feelings about Moby one way or the other, but I do know that middle-school kids, who make up a sizeable part of Eminem's core audience, have never even heard of Moby! He may as well have gone after Klaus Voormann or Edgar Froese."

I played that Moby song that samples Twin Peaks for my 15 year old (we were binging TP) and she started clowning it hard.

Moby probably turned a lot of Americans off of electronic music. I blame him for the rise of Nu Metal.

I haven't played them in a while, but I really liked some of those records, specifically Everything Is Wrong, Play, a handful of singles that came after, etc. That's less than 10% of his output though.

I'm in for his ambient meditation music, given away free for all to mellow whoever needs mellowing.

"Who the fuck is Moby?"

― Come On, (Eazy), Friday, March 27, 2026 10:11 PM (yesterday)

anecdotal hearsay comment or no, OT fucking M

somebody told me today they hadn't thought of "The Neverending Story" in decades and I said "Oh, God, I haven't thought of the band Atreyu in decades", and they said... ummm...

"Weh"

i don't know what "weh" means

urbandictionary says "The sound Titans make when they use their power", which doesn't help

“Why is Moby being so rude about this simple song?,” Moby continued. “We’re not transphobic. Why does he have to have a go at us?”

look i make cock-ups like this all the time so i'm not having a go at the NME over it, but i wanted to quote it anyway

Multiple personality Moby would be interesting.

He may as well have gone after Klaus Voormann or Edgar Froese

― clemenza, Saturday, March 28, 2026 10:34 AM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Eminem randomly taking a shot at Tangerine Dream would be so fucking funny

I'll defend Moby's 1992-1997 output.

you know, i think eminem could come up with a better edgar froese diss than i could

Edgar Froese can blow these…

Phaedra? sounds gay bruh