This summer, I’m going to make playlists and write about them. Here is the sixth entry about a series of tracks of I’m calling “Lovestuck.” If you’d like to read the posts in order of how the songs appear on the playlist, start here. Hope you enjoy.
“Sunny Afternoon,” The Kinks
Despite its upbeat rhythm and title, the opening bass-heavy notes of “Sunny Afternoon” spell doom. “It starts off descending and just floats on down for another 3.5 minutes,” Paul Williams once said in a Crawdaddy review in 1967. The protagonist’s lyrics are confessional about his woes, like a blues song—Kinks frontman and composer Ray Davies mentioned he was listening to Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home as he was composing, which features “Outlaw Blues,” for example, and “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Dying)”—and yet the complaints are delivered with a tipsy, Sinatra-inspired Old Hollywood croon, backed by the clean, angelic oohs and ahhs of a Lawrence Welk chorus. You can picture the dude Davies put at the center, a ruddy aristocrat on the sweeping, lonely veranda of his estate, drinking a Double Diamond and complaining to the one loyal butler who remains about not being able to take out his yacht.
The first time I really paid attention to The Kinks was in high school, and it was this song got to me. It somehow inhabits the state of its speaker so fully that when I hear it, I feel sunlight on my closed eyelids no matter where I am, damp cotton on my back, a wet heat that’s not too suffocating, slowing the thoughts so that all you have the energy to do is nod politely at your existential dread. In “Sunny Afternoon,” there are problems, sure, but nothing to be done. This is the final battle cry of the human animal, resigned to having a beer as the forces beyond his control rage around him.
There’s also another version of this song’s main character who I’ve watched from my window during social distancing: the regulation-bucking Oxfordians who own and rent houses in my neighborhood. While scientists predict a more brutal wave of the virus ahead, my neighbors have maskless keggers, instructing their delivery drivers’ Civics and Nissans to pull up next to their Benzes and Lexuses, tipping in dirty cash. Just as the American now moans about federal safety measures that protect the very workers who bring food to their porches, Davies referenced the woes of titled, landowning feudal-lord families as progressive postwar taxes swept Britain—the backbone, it should be noted, of the current relative strength of the NHS. Across history and nation, the song critiques those who mourn privileges that were never really theirs to begin with, the absurdity of those who think that their personal longing for their yachts (or in our case, dining-in at restaurants and partying) somehow outweighs the labor (and now risk) it takes to maintain them.
And yet, “Sunny Afternoon” might also highlight the luxuries that can’t be taken away so easily: the sun on your face, a cold beverage, a bit of quiet time. The loneliness of the speaker, abandoned by his girlfriend, mirrors those of us isolated from our loved ones; replace “sail my yacht” with something like “see my mom,” and the song equalizes somewhat, taking on heartbreaking relevancy. When the only thing to do in the face of a contagious killer is to stay home, most of us are lazing on a sunny afternoon, whether we like it or not.
Ray Davies was both sick and a new father when he composed the song, two conditions that keep one confined, sleepless and bored. He began to play around on his upright piano and invited his brother Dave to help him work out the instrumentation. “You listen to ‘Sunny Afternoon’ and you can see the light coming through the curtains…” Dave once told Kinks Fan Club Magazine. “It’s got that kind of magic to it because that’s what it was like. It was like Ray’s front room.”
I can attest there is magic to be made in a room. I’m always wary about having favorite quotes—it feels like rummaging through someone’s drawer of consciousness—but there’s one about the creative process that I live by like gospel, always attributed to Gustave Flaubert: “Be regular and orderly in your life so you may be violent and original in your art.” Patti Smith has a variation of this, too: “In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.”
Balance, stealth, regularity, order. In a room, or in your corner of a room, there are small doses of what we crave from the world: a sense of belonging, a place for everything, protection. In routine, there is something we can’t get from the larger passage of time: a small assurance about what will come next. When you know how and when your leisure ends, you can enjoy it, rather than fearing it will be taken away. When you know the distance from one spot to the next, you’re more likely to leap. In safety, there is play. In play, there is [ ]. Whatever you can dream up, fill in the blank. Your version of a sip from a cold bottle.
I would put spontaneity, or curiosity, or beauty, but it changes from day to day. Afternoon to afternoon. Anything I can think of, really, that I know will survive the fire.
Lara Avery 