On Lola, Dick, & Jane

2,333 words

The Kinks have been one of my favorite rock bands for many years. I have written about them for Counter-Currents on three occasions, most recently in my review of their great 1969 album Arthur. I also included their 1978 reggae number “Black Messiah” as one of the “Four Classic Rock Songs for the Dissident Right.” Their most famous song, however, is one I would never include on such a list, and in fact, I have always wondered about its lasting appeal in rock circles. Of course, I am talking about their evergreen 1970 hit “Lola.”

Anyone familiar with classic rock will be familiar with this masterful acoustic-electric sendup. It’s one of those rock songs that makes the most of its instrumentation, with its dobro and incessant maracas blending beautifully with the genre’s standard bass and electric guitar — but with no single instrument really dominating. And if you listen carefully, there’s a piano buried in the mix providing body to the song’s more powerful moments. The tune begins with a sweet, lyrical passage and gains momentum slowly and inexorably while buoyed by its catchy solfègic chorus (“La-la-la-la-la-Lola!”). It ultimately crescendos into its hard-hitting, triple-punch bridge as the song’s protagonist and eponymous character reach their point of greatest conflict (“I pushed her away! I walked to the door!”). After this, the song resolves in the same lovely, lyrical passages which started it off and finally ends with a powerful and iterative recapitulation of its chorus that is reminiscent of the classic ending of “Hey Jude” by the Beatles.

Musically, “Lola” is as good as it gets when it comes to rock and roll. It seems to be about a straight man having a romantic encounter with a transvestite named Lola. Not only this, but by describing this encounter as a positive thing, the song’s narrator — and by extension, songwriter Ray Davies — seem to be celebrating transvestitism and gender-bending in general. Or maybe not. Maybe the song is simply an ode to Lola, as its title suggests. The lyrics, as with many Kinks songs, leave much to interpretation — so you be the judge:

Well, that’s the way that I want it to stay
And I always want it to be that way for my Lola
La-la-la-Lola

Girls will be boys and boys will be girls
It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world except for Lola
La-la-la-Lola

Well, I left home just a week before
I never ever kissed a woman before
Lola smiled and took me by the hand
And said dear boy I’m gonna make you a man

Well, I’m not the world’s most physical man
But I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man
And so is Lola
La-la-la-la-Lola

So, do they hook up? Does our hero lose his virginity to a biological male? And what does “I’m gonna make you a man” mean, anyway? Perhaps Lola intends to turn our protagonist gay somehow. I get the fact that he, our protagonist, is glad he is a man — but what does “And so is Lola” mean? Is Lola also glad that he, our protagonist, is a man, or is Lola glad that Lola is a man?

You can buy Spencer J. Quinn’s novel Charity’s Blade here.

Who knows? It seems to me that whatever Davies was trying to do with “Lola,” he succeeded.

What baffles me is the song’s lasting appeal from a lyrical standpoint. What other contemporaneous major act sang about anything remotely similar to “Lola”? The Beatles, the Stones, Zep, Floyd, Faces, Dylan, Hendrix, The Beach Boys, The Who — none of them recorded anything that hit the nail so squarely on the head when it comes to gender-bending. Remember that this was pre-Hunky Dory by David Bowie. Elton John hadn’t come out yet, and the glam rock scene of the 1970s hadn’t yet taken off. Ultimate Classic Rock has released a list of the top “LGBTQ” pop songs of all time, and “Lola” is the second-earliest one to appear on it, following 1955’s “Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard (which had all its gay content scrubbed before it hit the radio, and thus probably shouldn’t count, anyway).

Maybe you can refer to 1967’s “Venus in Furs” by The Velvet Underground, but when they were recording, the Velvets were by no means a major act. Further, “Venus in Furs,” with its horror-movie pacing, strange tuning, and slashing strings is clearly a haunting — not to mention bizarre — song about sexual degeneracy (“Taste the whip/In love not given lightly/Taste the whip/Now bleed for me”). While not an endorsement of sadomasochism, the song does leave all innocence in the dust before it even starts. Not so “Lola.” With “Lola” we have sexual innocence meeting sexual degeneracy only to discover that maybe what we thought was degeneracy might not be degeneracy after all. Mind. Blown.

Of course, things changed over the course of the 1970s, but typically when a gay or bisexual rock star addressed the issue of sexuality in a song — for example, Jobriath’s “Take Me, I’m Yours” or Bowie’s “John, I’m Only Dancing” — it was conveyed, naturally enough, from a gay or bisexual perspective. Truth in advertising and all that — and audiences never seemed to care all that much either way. What makes “Lola” different is that it’s one of the few songs sung from a straight and sexually innocent perspective that is still willing to either accept or overlook gender-bending. Say what you want about Bowie and Lou Reed, but they never offered that.

This is an important distinction, because if “Lola”’s narrative was to play out in real life involving 99% of the classic rock fan base, they would recoil in horror. How would you react, dear heterosexual reader, if a single and innocent version of yourself met a transvestite in a romantic setting under false pretenses and then discovered the truth the hard way? Would you remember the encounter fondly and “always want it to be that way”? Or would you get out of there as soon as possible and start throwing punches if he/she/they gave you a hard time? I presume that in the majority of cases, the answer would be the latter.

Yet millions of normal, heterosexual teenagers throughout the English-speaking world have been singing along to la-la-la-la-Lola for decades, not giving it a second thought. Or, if they did, they’d share Davies’ open-mindedness on the subject as if there was nothing abnormal at all about girls being boys and boys being girls. It’s easy to do with characters in a song with a catchy chorus, but not so much with their flesh-and-blood counterparts, where one of things you might catch is a disease.

Another notable song which tackles gender-bending from a sexually innocent perspective — and in some ways picks up where “Lola” leaves off — is “Androgynous” by the proto-indie rock band The Replacements. Their 1984 album Let It Be was the first record I ever owned which wasn’t produced by a major recording artist for a major label. Right away I was struck by many things about the record: its fatalism, its profanity, its edginess, and its near-total contempt for production values. Singer Paul Westerberg’s husky soul haunts me to this day. The Replacements at that point in their careers were essentially a high-IQ garage band that made perfect outsider music — rough-hewn and low-fi as it was. If you’re young, lonely, and questioning your place in the world, Let It Be is a great place to go for comfort.

With only Westerberg on piano (and with muted sand blocks for percussion), the stripped-down and lovely “Androgynous” is musically unique within the raucous Let It Be milieu. Thematically, however, it epitomizes the outsider and populates the very center of this great album. As Wikipedia so aptly puts it:

The song, which has been described as “decades ahead of its time” describes in positive terms a romantic relationship between two gender non-conforming individuals, and expresses hope that in future such people and their personal relationships will be more accepted.

While “Androgynous” lacks the narrative and imagery of “Lola,” its emotional resonance is off the charts. Is there a better one in the rock canon? I don’t think so.

Here comes Dick, he’s wearing a skirt
Here comes Jane, you know she’s sporting a chain
Same hair, revolution
Same build, evolution
Tomorrow who’s gonna fuss?

And they love each other so
Androgynous
Closer than you know, love each other so
Androgynous

As with “Lola,” “Androgynous” ends by revisiting its beginning, but this time with some lyrical ambiguity, which separates the song from its message a bit and enhances its appeal. Plus, the way Westerberg amps up the passion makes this thematic crescendo all the more remarkable.

And tomorrow’s Dick is wearing pants
Tomorrow Janie’s wearing a dress
Future outcast and they don’t last
And today, the people dress the way that they please
The way they tried to do in the last centuries

And they love each other so
Androgynous
Closer than you know, love each other so
Androgynous

Is Westerberg saying that androgyny is merely a fad that Dick and Jane will ultimately grow out of? Or maybe that by eventually wearing gender-appropriate clothing, they will be the outcasts of the future — sort of like how they are right now? As with “Lola,” mind blown.

Aside from being many years ahead of the transgenderism curve, “Lola” and “Androgynous” share a certain optimism about the human condition — the idea that people can love and are worth loving as individuals because their true identities run deeper than socially-applied constructs such as gender. But when your civilization claims that it’s not society which assigns gender, but genetics — or even worse, God — then you have a problem: a problem which informs most of the conflict saturating these two songs. Lola, whoever he is, shouldn’t pretend to be a woman in order to seduce young, innocent men. And Dick and Jane need to stop wasting their time playacting gender roles and instead find someone to love the real way. The listener already knows this before the songs even begin. Thus, either Lola, Dick, and Jane are right, or God is. You can’t have both. Songwriters Ray Davies and Paul Westerberg make the most of this existential dilemma.

You can buy Spencer J. Quinn’s young adult novel The No College Club here.

This ties into my idea of transgenderism as gnostic heresy. A trans person — especially a Christian one — must blame the insidious demiurge for jumbling up his/her/their chromosomes during conception, rather than the one true God who loves everyone. This is classic Gnosticism, since it requires a kind of spiritual — or in this case, sexual — realignment in order to bypass the demiurge’s evil designs and attain the state of grace known as gnosis. This is what the characters in these songs long to attain.

But the question arises: Is it true? Are we independent of our sex? Better yet, are people who act as if we are — in the face of centuries or even millennia of tradition — worthy of our empathy not despite their deviancy, but because of it? Since, let’s face it, had Lola been a biological woman, and had Dick and Jane acted like normal kids, would either Davies or Westerberg have been interested in writing a song about them? Probably not. From their perspective, these characters should elicit our empathy because they blur the gender line, and their real identities are independent of that. But again, are these assertions true?

I believe that the answer is no on both accounts. As brilliant as these two songs are, they dangerously misconstrue human nature. Both were written at a time when the number of transgender individuals was truly miniscule. One could then afford to sympathize with a minority that was shunned, powerless, and despised. Lord knows that when I was a young man, naïve in my innocence and living off my parents’ hard-earned prosperity, I had sympathy to burn — and for many years, this put both “Lola” and “Androgynous” at the top of my favorite songs lists. It felt so good to be virtuous.

Hindsight tells me now, however, that the attempts to inspire empathy underlying both “Lola” and “Androgynous” were misplaced and helped to lead to the situation we are facing today. If the critics are right about one thing, it’s that these songs were ahead of their time — but not in a good way. These days, transgender numbers are growing, and transgender people are beginning to claim a group identity and organize politically. This is besides the fact that they have begun acting ruthlessly toward anyone who stands in their way. They further align themselves quite neatly with the radical Left and tend to follow in the footsteps of their murderous Communist forebears. I wonder how Ray Davies feels these days about transgender people sending death threats to author J. K. Rowling due to her stance against the veracity of transgenderism. I wonder how Paul Westerberg feels nowadays about transgender people committing violent acts as part of antifa organizations. And this likewise says nothing of the concerted efforts of powerful people to normalize transgenderism — of the operative, pharmaceutical, and permanent kind — among children.

I wonder if Ray Davies still “always want[s] it to be that way” regarding Lola. Tomorrow’s here, and I’m making a fuss over the ghoulish physicians and their deep-pocketed Bolshevik enablers who wish to medically mutilate children. Would Paul Westerberg approve? Can either of these songwriters imagine a world in which over 20% of our population consists of medically-altered, reproductively sterile, gender non-conforming androgynes? Because that’s where we’re headed. I wonder if they think this would be good for society? If so, how?

If not, then maybe we can learn from several decades of history and conclude that there were reasons why those who mix and match genders — like Lola, Dick, and Jane — were kept on the periphery of society in the first place. And maybe they were good reasons.

Apropos of everything, there is a song called “Kinks Shirt” by Matt Nathanson. Whatever you do, don’t watch this video. You have been duly warned.