Insights: The Most Relevant Album of Today Is From 1971

The Kinks were always ahead of their time. With hits in the Sixties such as “Well-Respected Man” (upper-class hypocrisy), “Sunny Afternoon” (losing everything to the taxman), and “Lola” (falling in love with a cross-dressing transvestite), Ray Davies and his crew never hesitated to take on issues seldom addressed by other rockers. And The Kinks’ songs were killers – with punkish guitar licks in their early days, and incredible melodies that seared the listener’s imagination. By 1970 they were at the top of their game. Everything they churned out was a winner.

Then came an album that sold hardly at all. Their 1971 record was entitled Muswell Hillbillies, an album so different than what their fans had come to expect that the record was panned in almost all quarters. It was seen as a clumsy attempt at Americana, a slow snooze of melancholy tunes purposely created to disturb all the peace and goodwill of the folk era. Which turned out to be exactly the point. Ray Davies as chief songwriter and lyricist had a world view unlike that of any other songwriter, one that emanated from lower-class England. There is no current album more prescient, more relevant, and yes, more distressing than Muswell Hillbillies.

The first track sets the tone admirably. It’s entitled “20th Century Man” and tells the tale of someone overwhelmed by technology and the “mechanical nightmare” that has engulfed modern society. That someone longs for escape to a different century, one that isn’t filled with “smart modern writers and smart modern painters”. He prefers the plays ofWilliam Shakespeare and the paintings of Rembrandt, Titian, Da Vinci and Gainsborough, but fears he has become “a paranoid schizoid product” of the present day. The song is a simmering masterpiece, beginning with a slowly strummed acoustic guitar and escalating gradually into an electric wildness that is pure rock and roll. The song predates and anticipates much of what Pink Floyd did in “Wish You Were Here”. The message from Ray Davies is universal rather than private – modern life is a slave to technology and has no soul.

Next up is “Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues”, and it’s about a man who has become too afraid to leave his house. In his mind the third world war is imminent, and not only is he ill with apprehension, but his neighbours are also afflicted with the malaise. There’s no cure for this world-wide paranoia in our anti-hero’s outlook.

From there Ray Davies takes us on a ‘Holiday”, but it’s an enforced seaside vacation his employer has demanded he take. The environmental pressures have got to him, he’s on sedatives, can’t sleep or work, so he’s on leave, but it’s a waking nightmare due to the pollution he encounters. He tells himself that he’s thankful even though “The sea is an open sewer”, and he is forced to “breathe through his mouth so he doesn’t have to sniff the air”.

“Skin and Bone” tells the tale of a once buxom lady who refuses to eat. She fell prey to a fake dietician who convinced her that she needed to lose weight. Now she’s so skinny “she looks like she’s ready to die”. That’s been the real life story of many an anorexic. “Thin is in” has been a mantra now for decades.

“Alcohol” – the demon drink of alcohol has destroyed many, and Ray Davies’ tale of how a man pressured by business and social engagements becomes addicted is a harrowing recounting of wasted life and lost dreams. It’s a slow, mournful tune that will stick in your memory.

Other outstanding tracks are “A Complicated Life”, and “The People In Grey”, both redolent of imagery that portrays life without a centre, without the resources to make decisions and control one’s own life. “The People in Grey” is particularly appropriate to current political events in America. A recent headline in The New York Times revealed that “layoffs of 10,000 federal health workers began today, with some workers finding out that they had lost their jobs when their office security badges did not work.” Just the sort of thing that Ray Davies was writing about in 1971.

The most disturbing track on the album, but one of the most important, is “Oklahoma, USA”, in which the narrator tells of a woman who is living a life of boredom but compensates by giving her mind over to a fantasy of living in America. She’s in a constant daze of thinking about living in Oklahoma with movie stars such as Doris Day or Errol Flynn. “All life we work, but work is a bore, and if life’s for livin’, what’s livin’ for…” Today in 2025 a billion or more people are spending up to 8 hours a day online, many of them consumed by social media, living through and for trivial video reels, emojis, “likes”, and connections of little emotional substance.

Muswell Hillbillies as a prescient sociological document of the inner lives of men and women today is right on the money. The addictions to fashion, the consumption of drugs, the lie behind living an artificial life, and the dangers posed to the human race by artificial intelligence: all these were clearly envisioned by Ray Davies -“the 20th Century man” who didn’t want to be there.

~ Note: The 2022 remastering of this album is superb, and contains additional materials not on the original vinyl release – thus the word “DELUXE” showing at the top of the remastered album image.