« Not exactly Coachella East | Main | Video: Thurston Moore, live @ the Knitting Factory »
January 16, 2008
Retrohump: Dead End Street
Although Wes Anderson soundtracks suggest that the best time for a mid-period Kinks song is when your quirky good time turns unexpectedly melancholy, my devotion to that era of the band doesn't need a specific cue. Right now, I've been particularly enamored with 1969's Arthur and more recently 1966's Face to Face. Below is the shoddy video for a swell track they slapped on to my re-issue of that album. It's been covered by former Portland sad sack Elliott Smith, but it has nowhere near the oldies radio ubiquity that their earlier, cruder songs enjoy. Love it now, so you'll know how to feel when it's used as a stand-in for emotion in a future art house dramedy.
the Kinks - "Dead End Street"
The Kinks were always the most class-conscious of the British Invasion titans, and the song has a righteous fury about being stuck under the socio-economic gun. The above video has got some serious tone issues, though. Shots of real life British dead-enders mix in with grimly comic footage of the boys as demented paul bearers moving from one run-down apartment to the next, collecting the poor departed. That'd be a little heavy handed no matter how it was played, but nothing is helped by the influx of silly wigs and 'staches that have historically proved far too tempting for British comedians from John Cleese through Andy Mellman. The near immediate slip into terminal silliness sort of torpedoes the video's chance to show the kind of empathy present in the song itself, but it is fairly amusing. If you want to get worked up about being broke and angry yourself, try the track below unaccompanied.
P.S. John Edwards has got nothing to lose at this point. New theme song, perhaps?
Posted by Jeff Klingman at January 16, 2008 11:10 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.merryswankster.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/1390
