The Kinks - State of Confusion

By the summer of '83 The Kinks seemed to be everywhere (in Canada at any rate) with their quirky song "Come Dancing" and the band seemed to be on the verge of getting their second wind. At least that's how I saw it. To me they were a bunch of old has beens who wrote a couple of cool songs in the '60s, and wrote "Lola" a song that always felt like the companion piece to Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side." Considering Lou's song came out a couple years after, I suspect there was more than a passing wink and a nod to The Kinks.

This was my first Kinks album. When I got this, I knew maybe a couple of songs, and thought "Lola" was a song that was cool and weird, it was also old ... really old. Van Halen did the definitive version of "You Really Got Me" and that may seem sacrilegious but it is what it is. Oh, there were probably others I'd heard, but they were as far as I knew a '60s band that had a couple of hits. It was a bit of a surprise when "Come Dancing" became a hit and was being played on rock radio. State of Confusion was their twentieth album, and my first real exposure to the band. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but a piss and vinegar Ray Davies with his snarling vocals and piercing lyrics accompanied by little brother Dave's frenetic guitar parts and backing vocals caught me a little by surprise. That's the joy of being a casual discovering an established band.

From the opening salvo fired on the opening track "State of Confusion" the band takes a page out of The Clash's songbook before settling into their own groove. Ray was belting it out at the top of his range with his voice on the verge of cracking. These weren't a bunch of old guys resting on their laurels, they still had something to say, and were going to say it, dagnabbit. Now admittedly at the time, this was an album that to my twenty year old ears was hit and miss - but there was something undeniably cool about these guys. If there was a deficiency it was on my end. This kind of rough urgent power pop was just a little out of my wheelhouse. I was into the more polished and commercial "rock" and while I enjoyed the album it didn't really resonate with me. That being said, even back then there was something special to me about songs like "Don't Forget to Dance" and ""Cliches of the World (B-Movie). They were really good. Of course, time has a way of putting things in their place, and a song like "Young Conservatives" has more context than it did when I was twenty.

The Kinks were an old band, but looking back on it now Ray was in his late '30s and was still a relatively young man ... a man with a lot of experience but frankly still in his prime. The songs were a little bit of everything. Not quite new wave, not quite hard rock, a little rough around the edges, and Ray Davies who wrote the songs was still full of piss and vinegar.

While a song like "Come Dancing" is wrapped in nostalgia for a bygone era, and the music is a delightful blend of new and old, it would give way to songs like "Young Conservatives" a song that lamented a generation who had forgotten to rail against the establishment and had just given up and become complacent.

 I didn't really think much of it initially, but there was something about it that got under my skin, and I would end up buying the album. I would play it a few times, and pull a couple of songs off onto a few mix tapes, notably "Don't Forget to Dance" a song hit me in the feels, and "Bernadette" a straight ahead blues rocker that featured brother Dave on vocals.

It's funny that this really didn't ignite in me a passion for the band. The Kinks were always the Rodney Dangerfield of bands. They never seemed to get any respect. I liked the album for all that, but it didn't stay that long on my turntable. There was so much stuff to listen to in '83 that I only had so much time, and unless an album really resonated I had object permanence issues and was on to the next thing before I could really appreciate an album that was more of a slow burn. When thinking of the big British imports it generally takes a bit to get to The Kinks. They have their share of classics, and oddly within the pantheon of Kinks Klassics (I couldn't resist) "Come Dancing" is up their with their best. For all that I always thought of State of Confusion as a really cool album and a great second act from one of rocks great bands.

 I've played the album several times now, and it's been kind of cool to hear what I couldn't hear in my youth when I was more into the superficial nature of pop. I liked the music, and I liked the lyrics, but I was drawn to the shiny thing that stood out, and often didn't take the time to really figure out what was going on. Maybe I missed something back in the day, but that can simply be blamed on my (you know it's coming, don't fight it) State of Confusion.

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