‘Monica’: The Kinks song devoted to sex
If albums could be reduced to single emotions, The Kinks‘ Village Green Preservation Society would be the disappointment that comes with stumbling across something that used to look, feel, and smell different. It’s the lost charms of something that once bristled with excitement, subdued to a haze of strange dullness. It’s the unrelenting feeling inside that says, “They don’t make ’em like they used to”.
Most of this can, of course, be pinned down to the fact that that’s exactly how Ray Davies felt while making it. A disillusioned soul grasping to hold on to the traditions that once defined his home country, Davies wasn’t just longing for the past; he was celebrating it, all while working relentlessly to reveal all the reasons why modern society was failing. In other words, it was Davies’ way of saying: England is losing its identity, and we need to do something about it, now.
However, that wasn’t the only thing that made Village Green seem steeped in disappointment. It was also a sleeper, which meant that, when it was released, and despite the fact that many people shared Davies’ conservatism, hardly anyone knew how to listen to it. While all the notes were there, all the ones that Davies was trying to get across mostly fell flat. This only makes its current popularity particularly poignant.
That, plus the fact that Davies’ yearn for an old, dying society seems a position more fitting than ever. “People are screaming its praises now,” Dave Davies told the Independent. “But when it came out, people were scared of it. They didn’t get it.” Whatever mindset people take while listening to it now, it holds a certain boldness that was only on the precipice back then, untethered to the angst of wanting something that no longer exists, or perhaps never even existed at all.
But the other thing about Village Green‘s misinterpretation wasn’t that its message was unclear; it also tapped into basic experiences and desires, like sex and romance. ‘Monica’, for instance, was once referred to by Davies while claiming how people fail to notice the album’s sensual side. “It’s about a lot of sex,” he told Q. “Monica, Annabella… All these women that will bring you down, disgrace you. Make you leave your wife and family for a little leg over in the woods. It’s about repressed sex.”
Traditionalism and sexual desire aren’t concepts that rarely cross paths, or at least not in obvious ways, anyway. However, there’s something to be said about the ways Davies injected these notes into his broader view about English aristocracy, and why it felt so frightening (or threatening) to let go of the aspects of society he held dear. In ‘Monica’, these two concepts crossover in the ways that the men fail to woo her in traditional ways, like proposing or buying her gifts.
Instead, Monica is too intelligent and defiant to entertain such meaningless propositions, and endears herself to Davies in a way that makes him feel despair (“I shall die if I should lose Monica”). In the end, it’s the threat of what he can’t control that makes him anxious, with both sides of societal disillusionment and sexual desire meeting in the middle in a strange haze of inexplicable paranoia. Perhaps this is why the album became the Kinks’ most revealing, because it presented them at their most authentic, the good and the bad.
