The Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset": Great But Overrated?

Lots of covers of it here: https://secondhandsongs.com/performance/2966

I sampled a few, it's kind of hard to record a bad version of "Dock of the Bay".

I take the English language part as being about a certain idea of England at a certain time and the beautiful part as about the physical beauty of Terence Stamp and Julie Christie, even if maybe it isn’t actually about them.

Beautiful part also about Rasa’s high harmonies.

It’s part of the same England-inflected melancholy that runs from Poor Cow to The Limey.

This is the same debate as “Ringo wasn’t even the best drummer in The Beatles!”

Sha-la-la, man.

I dunno, Xgau tends to be fairly literal in his opinions. For myself, I couldn't tell you specifically which song it is, but I'm about 99% sure the most beautiful song in the English language was written before the dawn of the recorded music industry.

Right. Some Buddy Bolden thing, no doubt, except that might not have had words.

Or some old hymn or spiritual maybe.

How Grebt Thou Art?

Or maybe an old folk song or some ragtime, vaudeville or Tin Pan Alley number. There's just so many great old songs.

Michigan J. Frog to thread!

But I think perhaps one reason Xgau selected that song is because its a lovely and striking harmony that is fitted well to an ingenious lyric, that could be interpreted as an analogy to the experience of listening to music, both alone and socially (including the social practice of music criticism). The lyric starts out about a solitary person who doesn't need any friends because they find pleasure in a private aesthetic experience (think of listening to a record alone at home) but then in the last verse it switches to a couple sharing the same experience together (think of Christgau and his wife bonding over their shared love of listening to and arguing about music).

I think this song is just too idiosyncratic to have generated many cover versions.

that could be interpreted as an analogy to the experience of listening to music

This is why I often think of "Roadrunner" as the suburban/American "Waterloo Sunset," though it lacks the element of third-person storytelling with the other characters sharing the same experience.

Have you read that recent book about “Roadrunner”?

Not yet, have you?

Yup

Is there a non-album Kinks tracks poll / thread somewhere? I seem to remember there being one around the time of the Kinks poll, maybe as a side poll, but am having trouble tracking it down.

Occasioned by a Saturday late morning spent listening to the 3xCD VILLAGE GREEN deluxe ed. with what is, without exaggeration, basically an album's worth of equally good songs. And it sounds especially good to me because most of this stuff I've basically only heard once or twice and quite a long time ago at this point.

https://www.discogs.com/release/586438-The-Kinks-The-Kinks-Are-The-Village-Green-Preservation-Society

sorry, i meant to post that in the village green thread, but i spose this will do, too

maybe i was thinking of this:
Kinks Deep Cuts: B-sides, rarities, etc.

realizing that i've had multiple versions of this epiphany over the years, one of them on ILX even, lol. sometimes we post before we think. there's evidently lots of good discussion of non-album stuff (and varying conceptions of "the great lost kinks album")

That 3 CD package is really the only one of its kind that I own. It's thorough, though I guess we could have lived without hearing "Spotty Grotty Anna" or "Mick Avory's Underpants".

Amazingly, I was playing that same Kinks set last night. The deluxe 50th Anniversary box set may be even greater, but there's also a ton of overlap and it's a lot more $$$ - pretty hard to justify the purchase when you have the 3CD set that's far cheaper.

I skipped the 50th anniversary Village Green for the same reason — I already have most of those songs, and the few things unreleased things (or new — wasn’t there a new Ray vocal over a ‘60s track or something?) didn’t seem worth the dough. Similarly, with the upcoming combined Muswell Hillbillies/Everybody’s In Showbiz set: the best outtakes are already on those albums’ 2CD reissues from a few years ago. And as much as I love Muswell, swap “Skin and Bone” for the “Waterloo” rewrite/update “Lavender Lane” and you got a stone classic album there.

I'll have to try that. I do have the Legacy edition of Muswell from Sony/RCA - supposedly the best sounding one though I've never been able to compare it to past reissues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFbQQzkZuqU

wow.

great performance of an absolute classic, don't believe the "don't believe the hype" people

What are the supposed flaws in this song again?

fcc otm fifth post in.