Anti-Climacus

Desert Island Disc #4-- Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)


If one wanted a marked and obvious contrast to "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," one could do worse than The Kinks' "Victoria":

I was born, lucky me
In a land that I love
Though I am poor, I am free
When I grow I shall fight
For this land I shall die
Let her sun never set

In the space of one verse, Ray Davies establishes both the sentiment of his character and creates authorly space between himself and his creation. Whether these elements are there in The Band's song is a matter of debate; that they are there in Davies' is indisputable.

So it goes with the rest of Arthur. It's either the worst idea for a concept album ever, or the best (I go back and forth): following a fictionalized Briton through the major events of the 20th century. The album was originally intended as a companion-piece to a Granada TV mini-series, but the series never got past initial planning stages. The album is the peak of The Kinks' late-60s run of excellent albums (Something Else, Village Green Preservation Society and Muswell Hillbillies, with Face to Face right before and Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One as slightly lesser accomplishments), and possibly the height of Davies' songwriting abilities. He wrote many individual songs that are better than the ones of this album, but never a collection this strong all around.

"Mr. Churchill Says" was surprising to me on my first listen, somewhere around 2000, because it is ever so slightly satiric with respect to Mr. Churchill, which is not the sort of thing we middle American children grow up thinking to be acceptable. What I like about it now is that the satire is complex and shifts over the course of the song: sometimes it's a parody of speechifying and sometimes it seems quite serious.

Arthur is the odd duck in my desert island discs, and always the one most in threat of being replaced. And yet there is lyrical sophistication here that is not present in so much other music: little with character and perspective, little that manages satire at all (why needle when you can sledgehammer?), much less consciously manipulates the level of satire--and I'd like to think that on my imagined desert island, I'd have the need for something complex.