The Kinks' diminishing importance over time?

There are too many for me to list, so I'll recommend my favorite run of albums by anyone ever for you to start: Face To Face, Something Else By The Kinks and The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. The Deluxe Editions of these records also have all the period singles, making this run even more fun of a listen. I throw Dave Davies' Hidden Treasures into that great run, but you have to be a little deeper into the Kinks to understand that one.

 

I don't think I've ever read a more incomprehensible post on this forum. Start to finish, it makes no sense whatsoever.

 

扭结

 

Good stuff! I know bits of these records, but plan to dig in deeper. I'm especially curious about Hidden Treasures. Thanks!

 

It's image. Ray doesn't have enough of an iconic image to subsume and make comprehensible for the masses the changes in their music over the years. This relegates the Kinks to being only a hugely influential, successful, respected and beloved group internationally, and a special treasure at home a la the Jam and Blur, who followed in their footsteps.

 

This might ruin your enjoyment of this song.
So you may want to skip this message........
Well, I warned you......

There was this girl back in grade school....
Our music teacher would have her get up and sing this song in front of the class.
The teacher and the girl claimed that SHE wrote the song!
We were all too young and unaware of the Kinks to know better.
She actually went over to the music teacher's house and studied privately with him.
He supposedly got beaten up by some people robbing his house. When he returned to school, he had his head bandaged up for a long time after that.
As a kid, I believed the story, but now that I'm older, I wonder if the girl's father caught him doing something.....
I don't mean to take this thread to a dark place, but that's what I think of when I hear this song.
I've never liked it, because of that.
I never liked the girl or the music teacher either!

 

In this part of the country, they only play 4 or 5 Kinks songs on classic rock stations. I imagine people who only know the band from radio play probably think of them as a group with a handful of hits who faded away fairly quickly. That's assuming they know that the Kinks recorded these songs.

 

I'm one of those who didn't really know a lot except the big hits. The only record of theirs I ever owned was a relatively late one, Word Of Mouth. Someone gave me it to me, and it did have a couple great songs on it: Do It Again, Living On A Thin Line. So clearly the Kinks did a lot of good stuff over a lot of years, most of it I just did not know about. These post are helping with my Kinks higher education!

 

I'm afraid I haven't looked through the whole thread, so I'm sure something like this has been said many times already: I was not aware that The Kinks' importance had diminished over time. They are surely one of the more culturally significant bands of the last 50+ years. The huge popularity of the Sunny Afternoon musical is a more recent addition to evidence of their enduring significance.

 

This thread could honestly be about any non-Beatles 60's band. What rare cuts does one hear from The Stones or The Who on the radio anymore?

It would be instructive to see how many Stones mono vinyl box sets sell vs the new Kinks set. I'd expect them to both be in the same strata.

 

Fair enough, but the Stones and the Who get a lot of their recognizable songs played consistently. I think there are quite a few Kinks songs that would be familiar to people if they get to hear them again.

You might be right. I imagine the same people who will spend the money on a Stones mono collection will probably want the Kinks set as well.
I would like them both myself, I just can't see spending that kind of money right now.

 

Not more than anyone else, to me.

 

Agreed. Kinks love has apparentky dimished in the US but they still held in very high estime by British musicians and fans. They are absolute bloody legends. Actual sales of their music has nose-dived (I presume) but who gives a damn.

 

The Kinks was and will always be one of the greatest bands of all time
Ray Davies will always be one of the greatest song-writers
The sun will always set on Waterloo station
Don t believe anything else

 

Fresh compared to what? Consider the songs at the top of the Hot 100 today and I think early rock bands sound quite quaint as well. Fast-forward 50 more years in the future and I really don't think the audience will be listening to anything similar to the style popularized by the British Invasion. Music has always gone forward and our era is not special.

 

The relevance of every band of the 60s is slowly diminishing over time. It's inevitable.
The good news is: it doesn't impact on the actual quality of the music, you just have to get used to less and less people (and media) talking about it.

 

The Beatles - Brilliant, cool, and beautiful
The Stones - Raunchy and rocking bad boys
The Who -- Screaming and guitar bashing
The Kinks -- Quirky, campy, tongue-in-cheek

Which of these descriptions is least likely to inspire monster of rock n' roll cultism?

 

There does seem to be a hard core of Kinks lovers so one answer to the OP is no.

 

While it's certainly true that the general music fan's knowledge and appreciation of The Kinks has diminished, I don't think that their importance has. Certainly not to me, anyway. It did take me a while to really appreciate them, however. After my initial curiosity saw me purchase the obligatory compilation CD, I also bought One For The Road and the Come Dancing compilation. Probably due to seeing a few live clips and the "Do It Again" and "Come Dancing" clips. For some inexplicable reason, it wasn't until a handful of years later that I finally got some actual Kinks albums: Something Else, Village Green and Lola. Loved them all. Then...nothing much happened. Picked up a copy of Arthur and Face To Face along the way, but it wasn't until 2011 and the deluxe reissue series that it finally clicked. All of a sudden, The Kinks were right up there with The Who and Stones in my musical pecking order. I couldn't quite believe what had taken me so long...and just how many great songs they had...and this is just on their '60's output. Their recorded output during the '60's is, in my opinion, every bit as good as anything by the Beatles, Stones or Who. Just not as well known. I've made several Kinks compilations for friends of mine who only have a passing knowledge of their material and they all have the same reaction: can I get some more of this stuff? I personally think that every album from Kontroversy to Muswell Hillbillies is essential. And that's not counting all the awesomes singles, B-Sides, EP tracks and material that didn't quite make it to disc. Hell, I even really like their final studio album, Phobia. Probably 4-6 songs too long, but there's some seriously good tracks on there. I'm currently putting together a 4CD Kinks compilation for a friend of mine, but it's proving very difficult deciding on which songs to leave out. I think it may stretch to a 5th CD.

 

To answer the OP, I'd so emphatically "no". People aren't talking about them quite as much now perhaps because unlike some of the other "legacy" acts who are far more rock orientated The Kinks aren't constantly peddling reissues to empty their fans' wallets. Their definitive MONO box release of a few years ago is now trading at a staggeringly high price due to the word "limited" actually meaning limited in this case. The Kinks represent that quintessential Britishness in the world of pop music; something about that stiff upper lip and not wanting to make too much noise about a good thing probably extends to their largely literate, intelligent, discreet, subdued fan-base!

 

I dunno, maybe it's wishful thinking, but I can see the highlights of the Kinks songbook (if not necessarily the recordings themselves) enduring for a long time to come into the future.. maybe not in a general awareness of the artist sense, but in a 'hey I know that tune' sense. With regards to your 1916 comparison , I recently listened to a bunch of Scott Joplin rags (knowing nothing about his ouvre) and was surprised by how many I already knew that had clearly seeped in through being used in various contexts over the years.

 

Changing tastes, new generations. A lot of the major artists of that era who were highly influential in their day -- like The Kinks or Van Morrison, or even going back a little, Chuck Berry (there was a time not that long ago when every rock band from the top pros to every 15 year old in their parents' garages, regularly played Chuck Berry tunes and anyone at any time could call one or another Chuck Berry tune and pretty much every rock musician knew it, not anymore) -- don't hold the some positions they once did (not that they're wholly marginalized, but they're not big acts at the center of things widely listened too by everyone interested in rock music). Others, like, say, Black Sabbath, who people kind of laughed at 40 years ago or Nick Drake who know one heard of 40 years ago, have seen their reputations grow. It comes and goes.

Inactivity and not having a string of "comebacks" might be a factor, as I think it's been true too for Sly Stone, who is another one who I think was a giant among giants once but not as widely revered today ....but others, like Morrison or Neil Young (I don't know anyone under 40 who listens to Neil Young) have remained active, but don't occupy the same sort of cultural space they did in the '70s (where, say Led Zeppelin, who haven't been active, do, or Elton John, who has been, does).

Reputations change, different generations of musicians and listeners find different things in the music of the past. The number of artists that people know and care about from the past, that are thought of as the "big" ones, shrinks; then sometimes work gets reappraised. You know, Herman Melville died in obscurity, with the reputation of being a travel writer who destroyed his career by leaving behind travelogues for crazy philosophical metaphor laden art novels, 40 years later, one of the novels that destroyed his reputation in his lifetime, became the great American novel. The book didn't change, but audiences and critical perception did.

 

You are in the UK. I'm suggesting that they have diminished globally. But it was a question, not a statement.

 

They did give it a chance, though. They had been recording and touring for decades, certainly since their late-70s/early-80s resurgence.

If anything, I think it was the opposite problem. The Stones and the Who broke up in the 80s, so when they came back (starting in 1989) it was ZOMG THE LEGENDARY WHOSTONES ARE TOURING ONCE AGAIN!! DON'T MISS THEM!!

The Kinks never went away and I think a lot of people took them for granted.

 

Doesn't affect my enjoyment of the song, but.... YIKES!!