Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Vive la 'vieve

This feature does indeed highlight a great song. And one that is generally overlooked, a deep cut in the truest sense. The author, who is of course named "Genevieve" herself, calls Preservation Act 1 a "falled concept album", which is in a way a redundancy. While there have been a few successes in the form (it's done all right by Pink Floyd a couple of times), it usually requires a lot of tolerance. Ray Davies, being a very smart man, made sure to leave himself some escape hatches so that he wasn't imprisoned by the concept, and this is one happy result.

Reading the article reminded me of a girl I used to work with. Her name was Jen, short for "Jennifer," but she'd heard from her mother that the mother had wanted to name her "Genevieve." In this case, the name was supposed to have the original French pronunciation of ZHAHN-vee-EV. Mom said that she decided against it because people would always be misproununcing it. Jen's response was, "Mom, you know me. You know how much I'd enjoy correcting them."

Ah well, as some other British Invasion stalwarts wrote, you can't always get what you want.

3 comments:

susan said...

In my opinion the Kinks never made a bad album but the one that worked best as a concept piece was 'The Village Green Preservation Society'. I can't think of a single song I didn't love on that album. In a way 'Genevieve' reminds me of those songs and it's definitely quintessential Ray Davies. I'm still singing it to myself.

semiconscious said...

the great lost kinks xmas chain-email incoming...

Ben said...

Lost... and found?

"Genevieve" does have a lot of qualities of The Village Green Preservation Society, an album that actually conjures up a lovely world of its own.