There is probably no other song that I'll be featuring in this series this year that has less to do with my overall thesis about 1983 than The Kinks's "Come Dancing," which started its climb up the Billboard charts forty years ago last week. First of all, we're talking about The Kinks, a band that was part of the original British Invasion of the 1960s, not the second one in the 1980s. Second, we're talking about a song that very explicitly--in terms of its lyrics and subject matter, its composition and musical architecture, and really its whole vibe--poses itself against the cosmopolitan, technological, multi-racial, multicultural, sexually ambiguous sounds and styles of the urban club scenes of London or New York City by going back, rather than leaping forward into some kind of angrier, louder sound. Ray Davies here wrote a profoundly English song, a profoundly heterosexual song, really a profoundly traditional 1960s pop song. That doesn't mean that those who weren't young men on the make in the dance halls of north London sixty years ago--or those who weren't the even younger men who, like Davies himself, sadly but also enviously watched their older sister take advantage of such young men--can't relate. Hundreds of millions have been moved by Paul McCartney's "Penny Lane," after all, and "Come Dancing" is, at its heart, a similarly intimate portrait of a place and time...just a little bit heavier, and a little bit more personal, all the same.
Fact is, the song is a damn pop masterpiece. I love all (well, nearly all) of the songs in this series, but probably only a handful of them truly rate as great, lasting songs. This is one of them.
