He started the blog halffastcycling.club to chronicle a coast-to-coast bike trip and I’ll let him tell you the rest. Recently retired from a series of careers (in co-ops, plumbing, and health care), I spend my time riding my bike (once across the continent wasn’t enough so I quit working to do it again), paddling, writing about bikes and whatever pops into my head, and sitting on the front porch in a rocking chair. I’m old enough that I remember this music when it was new, not from oldies stations. The first hit records I remember hearing were by Little Richard (78 RPM). (I have older siblings.) My intro to live music (besides high school dances) was through BB King (followed quickly by Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Luther Allison, Bonnie Raitt, Pete Seeger, and the Grateful Dead, among others). I wrote a high school term paper on the Beatles (after reading the new Hunter Davies bio in 1968) and got a D.
Muswell Hillbilly
The Buddha said that life is suffering and suffering arises from desire.
Pop culture, one could argue, is the packaging and selling of fantasy. Hell, one could argue that all of capitalism involves packaging and selling fantasy. And by fantasy, I mean the objects of desire.
One of the more insidious forms of fantasy is nostalgia…a desire for what was or, more commonly, what never was but what we imagine to have been.
Make America Great Again sells us the fantasy that there once was a time that the USA was great and that it is no longer. When was it great? That’s never specified, but maybe it was 1776 or maybe 1956. When did it stop being great? That’s implied, but might be when folks other than white, property-owning men wanted their share.
Carol Hanisch wrote a paper that was published in 1970 with the title “The Personal is Political”. She argued that “There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.”
What does this have to do with The Kinks? In 1964 they released “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night”, two songs that led some 11 year olds I know to think we could be rock and rollers. The Beatles were unreachable to us, but we thought we could be The Kinks. Some of us only fantasized. Some went out and bought instruments. None of us became rock and roll musicians. (At least not that particular group of 11 year olds.)
By the time “Muswell Hillbillies” was released in 1971, rock music had gained sophistication, musically and lyrically. It was no longer enough to sing “I wanna hold your hand” or “Girl, I want to be with you in the daytime”, even if we added “nighttime” (“nudge-nudge, wink-wink, say no more”).
https://www.youtubetrimmer.com/view/?v=ona-RhLfRfc&start=5&end=10&loop=0
A critique of mainstream society was an element of rock by then. In 1969 The Jefferson Airplane sang:
We are forces of chaos and anarchy.
Everything they say we are we are.
And we are very
Proud of ourselves.
The world of rock music had moved on from selling 2 minute singles to selling albums. Albums then became more than a collection of singles and filler. The Kinks had already embraced that by 1968’s “The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society” as well as 1970’s “Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One”. “Lola” was both a critique of the music industry and an exploration of sexuality and gender. I hope this series will cover both of these songs or albums. (If not, check out this and this from Powerpop five years ago.)
Muswell Hill is a suburban district of North London, the childhood home of Ray and Dave Davies. It is also the location of St Luke’s Woodside Hospital for Functional Nervous Disorders, a branch of the former St. Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics (1751-1916).
Muswell Hillbillies
explores alienation and mental illness. “Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues” is sung from the viewpoint of a man who is “too terrified to walk out of my own front door”.
He sings:
They’re watching my house and they’re tapping my telephone.
I can’t trust nobody, but I’m much too scared to be on my own.
And the income tax collector’s got his beady eye on me.
Oh, there ain’t no cure for acute schizophrenia disease.
In “Catch-22″ (1961), Joseph Heller wrote, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
In the US, COINTELPRO (1956-71) targeted anyone the FBI considered subversive. That originally meant suspected communists, then mostly Black people but also the New Left. They aimed to disrupt organizations via planting false information, creating conflict, infiltration; in short, by making people paranoid. MKUltra (1953-73), a CIA program, dosed people with LSD and other psychedelics without their knowledge. So is the protagonist of Muswell Hillbillies crazy, or does he just think he is, or is there no difference?
In “20th Century Man”, he sings:
This is the age of machinery,
A mechanical nightmare,
The wonderful world of technology,
Napalm, hydrogen bombs, biological warfare.
He has confirmed Hanisch’s assertion that “the personal is political”. He is paranoid but the solution is not an individual one because the problem is not an individual one. Therapy is not going to fix this.
In the title track (you knew we’d get to that eventually, right?) the singer is nostalgic for a USA that he has never seen. US culture is dominant so he knows “Oklahoma” the musical, he knows roots music, and it sounds like he listened to “Rocky Raccoon” for some of his US education, or maybe it was cowboy movies:
Cos I’m a Muswell Hillbilly boy,
But my heart lies in old West Virginia,
Never seen New Orleans, Oklahoma, Tennessee,
Still I dream of the Black Hills that I ain’t never seen.
He’s headed for the mental hospital:
They’ll move me up to Muswell Hill tomorrow,
Photographs and souvenirs are all I’ve got,
They’re gonna try and make me change my way of living,
But they’ll never make me something that I’m not.
He knows he doesn’t fit in but he’s not certain that that is his problem. He recognizes that this is bigger than he is but feels powerless to stop it:
They’re putting us in identical little boxes,
No character just uniformity,
They’re trying to build a computerised community,
But they’ll never make a zombie out of me.
But maybe he can resist individually, even if he can’t stop the train. He doesn’t have the power to change society but maybe he can maintain some personal integrity. He is a little bit RP McMurphy from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1962, Ken Kesey). [Spoiler Alert: They make a zombie out of RP McMurphy via frontal lobotomy. Of note, the novel was written under the influence of LSD when Ken Kesey was a voluntary subject of MKUltra and working nights in a VA hospital psychiatric unit. He didn’t know it was a CIA project but did know he was getting free LSD.]
By 1971, the Left in the US was in disarray. By 1971, the Left in the US was in disarray. The 1970 bombing of the Army Math Research Center (AMRC), in the wake of the National Guard killing of students at Kent State and Jackson State, had brought the war home in a way no one expected, as someone was accidentally killed in the bombing. The Kent State killings had galvanized mainstream opposition to the war. [Killing people of color was a long-standing US tradition.] After Army Math, revolution no longer seemed to be just around the corner; and this shit was getting serious. Were we still, like the Jefferson Airplane, “very proud of ourselves”?
COINTELPRO and MKUltra had not yet been exposed and were still active. The American Dream seemed to be a nightmare. Paranoia is no fun. [Many in Madison, WI – home of AMRC – feared that the Grand Jury investigation would be a fishing expedition into the New Left and “We Won’t Talk” bumperstickers appeared around town. Were we paranoid? Were they after us?] Nostalgia began to look good – certainly in the US, probably equally in the UK.
The Muswell Hillbilly is paranoid, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t after him. He wants to live in a nostalgic fantasy world where life is simpler
But in her dreams, she is far away
In Oklahoma, USA.
– but instead he is being packed off to a mental hospital. He feels the alienation of modern life and continues to resist in any way that he can. When faced with a world we don’t want, what are our choices? We can capitulate, we can resist, we can escape to a fantasy world. We can organize, but even that looks hopeless to him.
Listen to the whole album.
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PowerPop... An Eclectic Collection of Pop Culture 