‘Tis the season to dust off The Kink’s “Father Christmas“, and to realize yet again what a wonderful, biting bit of social commentary that song is, all wrapped in a joyous, holiday sing-along!  I do believe it easily edges out John Lennon’s overly self-important “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” for coherent social commentary (not to mention sheer fun), and of course blows Sir Paul McCartney’s insipid “Wonderful Christmas Time” out of the water (and I say that as a die hard Beatles fan). It is a border-line crime against music that the latter two are overplayed to the point of nausea each December, while “Father Christmas” somehow remains an under-the-radar delight.

I am constantly surprised by the virtuosity of The Kinks, and lately I’ve been wondering why–why am I always surprised by them?  Why are they always just one of those other English groups?  When we speak of ye oulde British Invasion bands in hushed, reverent tones, we inevitably mean the Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Queen.  Why are the Kinks so recurrently relegated to also-ran status (as though they were some third-tier Hermie’s Hermits)?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like they’re unknown or anything: they were first-round Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame inductees; had a massive and acknowledged influence on Punk and New Wave; “Lola” is surely playing on some classic rock station as we speak; “Tired of Waiting” in some commercial; “Victoria” in a How I Met Your Mother re-run; and the twin 1964 hits of “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of The Night” contain hands-down, no contest, the two most influential, infectious, and imitated guitar riffs in the history of Rock, bar none.  Van Halen wisely chose to launch their career by covering “You Really Got Me.” The Doors ripped off “All Day” for their number 1 hit “Hello, I Love You.”  It is not an exaggeration to say that every three-chord Punk Band you could name is playing some minor variation of those two riffs.^[1]Kinks frontman Ray Davies also dated Pretenders frontwoman Chrissie Hynde in the ’70s before she hit it big–which means he has an indirect influence on another excellent under-the-radar … Continue reading Guaranteed at least one of their songs is one of your favorite songs.

And that’s just my point–given all their accomplishments, why are they so rarely spoken of in the same hushed awe as, say, the Beatles or Stones? 

My working theory is that The Kinks are just, well, so much more English than these other bands.  They don’t just happen to be English you see–no, they are thoroughly, proudly, quintessentially English.

By way of comparison, yes, the Beatles may make fleeting references to the Queen in “Penny Lane” and Side B of Abbey Road, but for the most part their musical influences and ethos, from their early R&B covers to their psychedelic experiments, are firmly rooted in America.  John Lennon (like so many of his peers) was famously trying to be like Elvis; “Rubber Soul” was their attempt to sound like The Byrds; “Back in the USSR” was their send-up of/homage to the Beach Boys; California and Arizona are name-checked in “Get Back;” their early hits included covers of “Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey”; John Lennon chose to live in New York over London.  They came from Liverpool, but their goal was clearly America.  Some pop-culture neophyte could be forgiven for assuming the Beatles were actually an American band.

Same deal with the Stones, the Who, Led Zep, Pink Floyd–all these bands got their starts covering American R&B standards.  Their favorite acts were Elvis, Bo Diddly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and the like.  The Rolling Stones are named for a Muddy Waters song–a Chicagoan, not a Londoner.  From the start, they were all openly trying to sound like Americans–and by the end of their careers, had all functionally become adopted-Americans, no matter their nationalities.  Robert Plant sings of “Going to California,” not the Isle of Wight or northern Spain; while your most meat-headed, ‘Murica-lovin’, patriotic red-neck will proudly get the Led out to Jimmy Page, blissfully unaware and indifferent to his British citizenship.

Note that the least-revered parts of these bands’ oeuvres here in the U.S. are typically the most British parts: David Bowie, for example, is much better known state-side for such NASA-saluting hits as “Space Oddity” than his more recent “I’m Afraid of Americans.”  The Who are best known in America for such state-less concept albums as “Tommy” and “Who’s Next,” while the much more explicitly British “Quadrophenia” (about warring gangs of Mods and Rockers in 1964 Brighton), remains a favorite only of the most dedicated Who fans–at least on this side of the pond, anyways.

But there is absolutely no confusion about where The Kinks come from.  They make none such attempts to imitate American singers; their thick North London accents shine through at all times; you can almost hear their crooked-teeth belting into the microphone.  Note that their signature Christmas song is called “Father Christmas,” not “Santa Claus.”  They composed an entire album entitled “Arthur: The Decline and Fall of the British Empire,” which featured the aforementioned “Victoria,” about, yes, Queen Victoria and the height of the British Empire^[2]The fact that the bloody British Empire is not something that should ever be romanticized is something I’m just gonna have to punt on right now..  “Waterloo Sunset” paints a romantic scene of Waterloo, London, not Kansas City or California.  “Lola” takes place in “Old Soho,” London, not New York.  “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” references the “Boutiques” and “Discotheques” of some fashionable dandy the way only an Englishman could–like it would never occur to an American to describe.

That is to say, the gaze and locus of The Kinks was always firmly in their native England, never on America.  They are not adopted-Americans; they are, as I said, thoroughly, proudly, quintessentially English.  I’m sure they appreciated having hits state-side, but they were never writing for the U.S.; they were writing for themselves.

And I fear that may be why they are perpetually the also-rans of the British Invasion–no matter their undisputed influence, no matter how awesome their songs, how fun their music, they are just too English for us Americans to fully embrace, deep down in our gut, like we have, say, the Stones or Beatles.  We are not nearly so cosmopolitan as we might hope; even someone who’s just firmly English is too foreign, too alien, too incomprehensible to our mainstream sensibilities.  Music written even in our native language must still be filtered through American lenses for our pop-culture to sub-consciously adopt it.

And I suspect that this is also a model for us as Latter-day Saints: it is no secret that we have spent the last 70-odd years doing all what we could to “normalize” ourselves into the U.S. mainstream. From Ezra Taft Benson’s cabinet appointment by President Eisenhower, to scoring Jimmy Stewart to star in the 1980 TV special “Mr. Krueger’s Christmas,” to the ascension of BYU and its aspirations to become some “Harvard of the West,” to the “Family: isn’t it about time” ads of the ’80s, to President Hinckley’s appearance on “60 Minutes” in the ’90s, to the Salt Lake Olympics in 2002, to Mitt Romney’s own presidential runs in the 2000s, to the late, lamented “And I’m a Mormon” ad campaign of the 2010s, to the “Light the World” machines on Times Square, to the recent rebranding of the Church logo with the Danish-Lutheran Christus statue, we as a Church have been open about ingratiating ourselves into the mainstream of American-Christian society.

Yet to date, the largest pop-cultural impact we have had is, notoriously, a parody South Park-produced musical on Broadway. That, and whatever soap operas and documentaries about Utah-area polygamists are still floating around these days. As someone back in the day once said, the Church wants to sit at the cool kids’ table, but can’t figure out which the cool kids’ table is.

So maybe it’s time to recognize that we really are supposed to be in the world but not of it (it’s not like “the world” is inviting us over anyways). Instead of aspiring to be something else, we should own what we are, idiosyncrasies and all. If that makes us The Kinks of U.S. religion rather than the Beatles or the Stones, all the better.^[3]Besides, given how trans-progressive “Lola” was clear back in 1970, we could stand to take some cues from The Kinks as well.

For that matter, to loop back to “Father Christmas”: the song is about some working class hoodlums assaulting a shopping-mall Santa^[4]Yes, I slipped into an Americanism here, sue me. for money because their families are so broke (“give my Dad a job cause he needs one”). It is a song about gross income inequality and working class despair turned to rage. Given how the Christ whose birth Christmas commemorates—and whose name President Nelson has put himself to extravagant pains to emphasize is the “true name of the Church”—is the same Christ who angrily flipped over the tables of the money-changers, told the rich young man to sell all that he has and give to the poor, who fed the five thousand without money and without price, an argument can be credibly made that economic anger undergirding The Kinks’ “Father Christmas” is more in tune with the teachings of the Savior than many of our most treasured hymns and carols.

For that matter, we are also the Church of the United Order, the Law of Consecration, 4 Nephi 1:3, Jacob 2:12-19, Mosiah 4:16-19, D&C 42, and so forth. We, too, should be angrily assaulting mall Santas and flipping over the tables of the money-changers in protest against the maltreatment poor. Are we the Church of Jesus Christ or aren’t we?