My Review: The Kinks - You Really Got Me

The Kinks - You Really Got Me

"Love at first sight is like living a century in a second"

 François Truffaut

Things seen from above have the same effect as a memory: one always has the impression that that distance cannot be reached.

London. Early 1960s.

A workshop of liberated senses, compulsory military service abolished, the will to procreate without the fear of a new war liberated the souls of thousands of families and the Middle Class experienced a splendour and development never experienced before. Soon Swinging London would be born, the engine of emotional, economic security, conquering the world. An urban agglomeration attracted by the expressive form of the arts in general, ruling total dominance over other English cities. But a heavy constraint overshadowed those movements in continuous excitement: fortunes, attentions were concentrated in the north, the temple of an anomalous intimacy capable, however, of centralising interests.

In music there were the Beatles.

The robust inclinations to differentiate that stereotype (I am of course referring to music) were made manifest by a band of minors, intent on playing mainly covers and with only two of their songs in their repertoire. They were called The Kinks, the real and true spark that could simultaneously light up and extinguish the future of the English capital and the glories of cities like Liverpool, Newcastle and Manchester.

A flurry of genius madness, unaware, under pressure from a record company that was in a hurry to cash in as time, between 1962 and 1964, was measured by the ability to fill the safes of banks that were the first to be interested.

Here comes the miracle: a party, the band playing, and a girl, unnamed, never seen again by the singer, who brings the young man's adrenalin to life to the point of leading him into a full-blown crush. 

All in vain: love did not materialise, but one of the most famous guitar riffs in history was born.

Would that be enough? Not by a long shot.

The pressure of Pye Records, the girl who disappeared into thin air, new bands emerging, had created a contained explosion and it was a razor shaving that changed the face and history of rock. Which, although it was not born with the song I'm telling you about, raised its pitch from there, became strategic, contemplative, a rough-skinned dragonfly, launched to change the scaffolding of both sound and expressive form.

Yes, sound: that razor that cut through the amplifier casing revealed one never heard before. In the recording studio everything was done to reproduce it and they succeeded. A few chords, the lyrics, circular, repetitive, simple in concept: the whole thing became the first benign bombshell of 1960s music. A piece with the incredible ability to make everything a fast-moving, snappy, snappy locomotive, with a remarkable force that, when it reached an extraordinary lopsided, rambling, imperfect guitar solo, but capable of rapturing the senses and making them explode, defined forever a green light for the creation of robust notes, which in a short time entered first psychedelia and then rock, to touch the ankles of punk.

London did not believe its eyes and above all its ears: a single song had provided yet another excuse to centralise interest and everything lit up, prompting new musical formations to follow that simple yet capable of giving the same strong emotions as blues and rock 'n' roll.

The style of performance found only a few precedents but lacked the desecration that that mutilated amplifier had bestowed, to give history a mammoth example. 

Influential, relevantly generous, a gift of fate that in its harshness was kind to those young boys close to depression: when anger becomes precious, the results cannot be missed.

What is interesting is the genesis, the first chords, with a marked need to approach Fats Domino, the band's true idol. Then the big deal, and now we are here crying out for a miracle... 

The vocals, when they double up just before the refrain, become the wave that reaches the USA from the English Channel, displacing the powerful union of musical formations that were playing with the most robust blues, but did not yet know that new musical genres were in a womb that had yet to give birth to a mighty novelty. 

That cavity was in the hands of the Kinks, with one song, to give the future a range of access, possibilities, unbalancing Beat, Pop, to create a distant and accessible core.

Short, as was the custom of the times, it had the merit of becoming very long as the years went by, because from those flashes a parallel universe descended to planet Earth. The Byrds, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin up to Deep Purple, had only to light a candle within their own compositional circuits and acknowledge to the Kinks a merit that lasts to this day...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

24th September 2023

https://youtu.be/fTTsY-oz6Go?si=y5FQXu5YwQRr3GU2