The Kinks w/ Mark Doyle
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 4 September 2023
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Kinks are one of the great rock bands of the 20th century and, like all artists, they reflect the times and places they've inhabited. In this episode, we speak with Mark Doyle about his excellent book The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-Detached (Reaktion Books, 2020) and how the band, their origins, and Ray Davies' lyrics reveal a lot about both the real and imagined spaces of mid-20th Century England.
Dr. Mark Doyle is Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University, where he specializes in the history of the British Empire. His research and teaching have won him numerous awards including the Stansky Book Prize (co-winner, 2017) and MTSU's Outstanding Teacher Award (2014-15). Ben once described him as "the Patton Oswalt of academic twitter," so we recommend you follow him there at @DrMarkDoyle.
We're excited to announce that Ben & Bob will be recording a live episode of RTN on the history of Americana music in Nashville on September 18, 2023 w/ guests Emmy Lou Harris, Rodney Crowell and Jefferson Cowie! Click here for tickets. Hope to see you there!
This is a rebroadcast of the Road to Now #169, which originally aired on April 27, 2020. This version was fully re-cut and edited by Ben Sawyer.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everybody, Bob here. When I tell people I play in a band, they inevitably ask me, |
| 0:10.6 | what kind of music do we play? And I'll say Americana. And they say, what's Americana? And I'll say, |
| 0:18.9 | good question. What is Americana? It's a big word. What does it mean? |
| 0:25.8 | Well, that's the question Ben and I are going to be asking at a live road to now taping at the Riverside Revival in Nashville, Tennessee on Monday, September 18th at 7 p.m. |
| 0:38.4 | We're going to be joined by historian Jefferson Cowie and Grammy-winning artist Emmy |
| 0:43.5 | Lou Harris and Rodney Crowell. What a panel. We want you to come and be a part of the conversation. |
| 0:50.7 | So that's The Road to Now Live at the Riverside Revival on September 18th, 7 p.m. in Nashville, Tennessee. |
| 1:00.1 | Please join us. Tickets are on sale now. |
| 1:06.4 | Mark Doyle, welcome to The Road to Now. |
| 1:09.2 | Thanks for having me. |
| 1:10.1 | Mark, when I was young and I got into classic rock, it was the Stones, it was the Who, |
| 1:16.0 | it was the Beatles, and then there was the kinks. |
| 1:18.8 | They didn't quite fit. |
| 1:20.3 | I looked at them more on the punk rock end of all of that. |
| 1:24.0 | They were seen to be nonconformists. |
| 1:26.5 | I'm so excited about your book. |
| 1:28.4 | What inspired you to grab a historical context of the kinks? |
| 1:34.3 | Yeah, it's, it's hard to trace the origins to a certain extent. |
| 1:37.9 | I didn't actually grow up listening to the kinks all that much. |
| 1:40.4 | I did go through a classic rock phase. |
| 1:41.9 | I grew up in suburban Oklahoma City, which was |
| 1:45.9 | not exactly a musical hotspot. The kicks I was sort of aware of, you know, those first |
... |
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