Working Out The Kinks

The Kinks
Album: Kinda Kinks
Song: Everybody's Gonna Be Happy

Any song with hand claps is thirty percent better than it otherwise would have been.  It's a songwriting given.  Combine hand claps with crazy rhythm guitar and Ray Davies on vocals and you've got a winner.

The Kinks are one of those bands that never quite got the respect they deserved.  One of the groups in the original "British invasion," they achieved some measure of commercial success, and 20 years later launched a moderately successful comeback, but today, as one of the many bands lost in the The Beatles' legacy, their influence has waned.

They are perhaps best known for their gender-bending classic, "Lola", and for the garage rock anthems, "You Really Got Me" and "All Day And All Of The Night", absolutely excellent songs all.  And they all point to one of the main reasons I like the band so much: The Kinks are delightfully sloppy.  It's all very rock'n'roll, the antithesis of the sanitized, produced-to-within-an-inch-of-its-creative-life cow fodder that dominates the airwaves.  Usually, it's considered an asset to be a "tight" ensemble; that is, a group in which the rhythmic element in particular is spot on.  But there's something about the "looseness" of bands like The Kinks that I find very appealing.  There's a type of musical energy which emerges, seemingly from the tension inherent in the possibility of the entire song degenerating into arhythmic chaos.

I chose our song of the day because it's one of the most irrepressibly upbeat songs ever written; with today's reprise of the seemingly never ending drizzle it's the perfect time for pure goofy happiness.

And, of course, I chose it for the hand claps.  Natch.