Desert Island Disc #1: Exile on Main Street, The Rolling Stones

One of the unspoken rules of the internet is that any aesthetic product, no matter how objectively good, must have its detractors who insist that it cannot possibly have any value. Or, worse, that it is inferior to works that are themselves inferior, in objective point of fact. So it goes with this, the best of the Rolling Stones' albums by a far distance. The objection is usually this: the most famous song on the album is "Tumbling Dice," which is 'no one's favorite Rolling Stones song.' The song is brought up to be an unflattering comparison to the other usual candidates, Beggars Banquet ("Sympathy for the Devil"), Let It Bleed ("Gimme Shelter" and "You Can't Always Get What You Want") or Sticky Fingers ("Brown Sugar" or "Wild Horses"). But the objection misses the point: Exile isn't better because its highs are higher (though they might be) but because the lows are higher: there's no equivalent to "Jig-Saw Puzzle" (Beggars, though I love it), "Let It Bleed" (Let It Bleed, no one's favorite six-minute song with just two verses) or "Sister Morphine" (Sticky Fingers, because you probably shouldn't write songs about the dangers of doing drugs while doing the drugs mentioned in the song; this is the sort of mawkish sentimentality that the Stones do very poorly, and would taint Exile's "Sweet Black Angel" if anyone could tell it was actually a defense of Angela Davis without being explicitly told).

And it just so happens that the album also contains two of the most unreservedly happy of Stones songs: "Loving Cup," which does an impressive job of combining actual romantic sentiment and innuendo, and shifts effortlessly from acoustic folk to horn-based funk, and "Happy," not Keith's finest vocal turn, nor his best song with lead vocals, but the most irreducibly Keith--lifting from other sources, proclaiming a (believable) indifference to wealth or the lack thereof, and generally well-dispositioned towards life no matter what.

One of my finest pleasures as a whippersnap was waiting until my parents had left the house and then turning this album way, way up and listening to it from start to finish. Minus the parents, it remains one of my great pleasures. I'm not sure there's really anything else you can ask from an album.

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.