EDM artist Moby has earned a reputation in recent years for putting his foot in his mouth—just ask Natalie Portman. The latest came earlier this year when he named this song in an interview with the Guardian, responding to a question about music he can no longer listen to, calling it “gross,” “transphobic,” and “unevolved.” Predictably enough, Kinks main guitar man and occasional songwriter Dave Davies fired back, citing trans entertainer Jayne County’s endorsement of the top 10 hit song’s influence on her. Fair enough, but for context you only have to turn to David Reuben’s bestselling Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (* But Were Afraid to Ask), a middlebrow Q&A sex manual published the year before in 1969 which was tremendously popular—later a Woody Allen movie. Trans issues were so far beyond the horizon at the time that Reuben is basically silent on anything related to gender identity, reducing transsexuality to the rather different transvestism, or cross-dressing, which he argued was practiced mainly by married heterosexual men with families (see the Woody Allen movie for the idea, a strange one). That’s the world the Kinks, of all people, were stepping into on a concept album from 1970. Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One was intended among other things as the band’s return to their hard-rocking bona fides, after several years of turning out albums with twee pop masterpieces (and that, of course, after initially busting down the walls of rock ‘n’ roll and making the world safe for rock with “You Really Got Me,” “All Day and All of the Night,” “Tired of Waiting for You,” etc., etc.).
I can see it both ways on “Lola” now: it was a thrilling rock song at the time and that side of it holds up well. It’s a Ray Davies song—the guy can write them. But the nuance of the lyrical thrust, such as it is, was basically over my 15-year-old head. They seemed to be playing the scenario for laughs, as a farce, and that’s how I took it, though somewhat uneasily. I understood it was trucking in outrageous taboo sexual themes but I took that more as pose. It feels sleazy, I think that’s the main thing Moby is complaining about, where nowadays respect and dignity are what’s on the menu for the LGBT+ community. But the mysteries of sexuality often make respect and dignity kind of party poopers in the clinch, giving up sexual charge for social acceptance, and who can blame anyone for that? There’s still some sexual charge to “Lola,” but it definitely feels dated, on the wrong side of right behavior. The song now hits as less than liberatory in most ways, though I can believe it could sound that way in 1970 and echoes are still there. And it’s not a bad rocker at all, a worthy addition to the Kinks catalog and a stone classic by any metric. I just don’t put it on very often and it sounds strange in public settings. One last odd detail: I recall at the time that Coca-Cola was incensed by the use of their name in this song and took legal action. It was hastily patched over in the studio as “cherry cola.” The versions on my streaming service now, however, are all once again “Coca-Cola.” I wonder when that happened? P.S. I love the comic book “official music video” on youtube. Worth a look even if you are like Moby and can’t stand to hear the song anymore.
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