again justin case you thought you had missed it..
here's a 2002 NY times article on the kinks...
query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE6DB1338F935A15756C0A9649C8B63Music; Ironic and Detached Long Before Fashion Caught Up
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By JOE HAGAN
Published: May 26, 2002
Correction Appended
WHAT ever happened to the Kinks? It's a question that apparently isn't asked often: unlike other darlings of the British Invasion, the Kinks don't have a boxed set retrospective or even a ''Behind the Music'' documentary to their name. And as 1960's nostalgia, they are wholly unsatisfying. In the era of flower power, the group's frontman, Ray Davies, was an ironic, world-weary sort who thumbed his nose at the record industry and made florid pop about the decline of the British Empire. In 1969, the Kinks made a concept album that was set in World War II.
But precisely because of this hermetic, disaffected posture, the band has found more kindred spirits now than it ever did in the past -- among indie rockers.
''The Kinks were like the first indie rock band, in a weird way,'' said David Lowery, whose alt-rock band Cracker covers the Kinks' 1969 single ''Victoria'' on the recent tribute album, ''This Is Where I Belong: The Songs of Ray Davies and the Kinks'' (Rykodisc).
A second newly released tribute, ''Give the People What We Want: Songs of the Kinks'' (SubPop), features Seattle garage rock bands.
That two such albums are just out underscores the Kinks' enduring importance. Mr. Davies's idiosyncratic songcraft has influenced artists as varied as the singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman, the grunge band Mudhoney and the pop purists Fountains of Wayne. Like the Velvet Underground, the Kinks foreshadowed the kind of self-conscious, literate rock that audiences take for granted in alternative rock groups.
Mr. Lowery said he had been accused of imitating the Kinks in his 1980's indie band, Camper Van Beethoven. ''I think it was because I was always writing ironic, sort of sarcastic songs when I was 20, 21,'' he said.
Mr. Davies had an ironic sensibility about 20 years before it became cool. While still hot off their early hits, the Kinks fell into a dispute with a music union during their 1965 tour of the United States and were barred from returning to this country for three and a half years. (The exact cause remains unclear, but the band's former drummer, Mick Avory, chalked it up to ''bad luck, bad management and bad behavior.'')
While pop artists in America focused on the counterculture, Mr. Davies turned his sardonic eye to the village green, then a fading idyll of British life that was giving way to modernization. As many bands were recording indulgent psychedelic albums, the Kinks made ''The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.'' In the title song, Mr. Davies pines, ''God save little shops, china cups and virginity.''
Conflicted by the social change around him, Mr. Davies yearned for the nostalgic Eden of his parents' generation. In a harpsicord-driven song, ''Village Green,'' the forlorn narrator, having left his home to seek fame, returns to find the girlfriend he left behind married to the town grocer, his old haunts overrun with American tourists who ''snap their photographs and say, 'Gaw darn it, isn't it a pretty scene?' ''
The record, which blended the sentimental sounds of Tin Pan Alley, British folk, skiffle and music hall with rock and blues, now stands among the most underappreciated of the era exactly because it is bereft of hippie clichés.
By the time the Kinks returned to America, they had changed from mop-topped mods to bitter folk rockers fed up with the machinations of the music industry. Their 1971 album, ''Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround,'' featured a song called ''Top of the Pops,'' in which the Kinks parodied the guitar sound of their early mod hits while sneering, ''Life is so good when your record's hot.'' It was the sort of jaundiced attitude that informed ''Cut Your Hair,'' the 1994 hit by the definitive indie rock band Pavement, in which Stephen Malkmus sassed, ''Songs mean a lot when songs are bought, and so are you.''
''What attracted me to the Kinks,'' said Ira Kaplan, the singer and guitarist for the indie rock band Yo La Tengo, ''was the way they established their own world for themselves, that seemed to occupy a space near everyone else but completely isolated from them.'' The band covers the Kinks' 1966 song ''Fancy'' on the Rykodisc collection.
Music; Ironic and Detached Long Before Fashion Caught Up
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By JOE HAGAN
Published: May 26, 2002
Correction Appended
Yo La Tengo, which is based in Hoboken, N.J., draws less from Mr. Davies's social observation and more from his atmosphere of melancholy, as if the band were playing only for itself. That sense of integrity in isolation, far from the corrupting glare of the popular, is the essence of indie rock.
For Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne, Mr. Davies's depiction of life in the London suburb of Muswell Hill showed him that his life in suburban New Jersey could be fodder for pop. ''You could write about anything you wanted to write about,'' Mr. Schlesinger said, ''and it would work.'' His band, named after a gardening store in Wayne, N.J., covers the Kinks' 1981 song ''Better Things'' on the Rykodisc album.
Many indie rock bands have also adopted the Kinks' mannered preservation of the past. Witness the recycling of old rock styles by the garage rock revivalists the Strokes and the White Stripes. Their hip listeners seem morbidly dedicated to preserving things like mod haircuts and vinyl LP's. Certainly such turn-of-the-century rockers can relate to the Kinks' sentimental snapshots of an empire in decline.
And what does Ray Davies think of all this? Now 56, Mr. Davies, a notorious curmudgeon, may have once been uncomfortable with tributes. (For the Rykodisc tribute, he wrote what he calls ''speculative liner notes'' before even listening to the songs.)
But in the last few years, Mr. Davies has found himself gravitating to these pop preservationists, too, performing with the British indie group Blur and Yo La Tengo. Last year, he played a rendition of his 1968 song ''Starstruck'' with the Canadian group the New Pornographers at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Tex.
Reached recently at Konk Studios in London, where he was working on a solo record, Mr. Davies was asked what he would say to the Ray Davies who, in 1969, wrote ''Shangri-La,'' an indictment of a working-class Brit who marks success in the accumulation of modern amenities, not the least of which is indoor plumbing.
''I'd probably foolishly say, 'Don't write about toilets,' '' he said. ''I would probably try to tone it down. But I was foolhardy and wanted to write about somebody living in Muswell Hill with a lavatory in the back yard.'' He still sounded like a man conflicted, having forsaken a boxed set of hits for a stubbornly personal vision.
Correction: May 26, 2002, Sunday A picture caption on Page 26 of Arts & Leisure today with an article about the British band the Kinks misstates the given name of a member shown performing in 1979. He is Dave Davies, not Ray.