The awesome power of the press

Slogging through a million Ray Davies interviews for a big Kinks project for Blender, here's something he said to Charles Shaar Murray in 1989:

"I found myself confronted with frightfully well-educated interviewers, people from The Observer actually reading things into my songs that I hadn't intended. Until a smart girl called Janet Maslin came along and pointed out in the New York Times that I write from an unconscious stream of thought and it bypasses any kind of analysis that I might do. So then I went through a stage of trying to analyse what I was doing and play it by their game, and that didn't work and the music became pretentious and I did. Not me," he adds hastily, "but 'I' through my work, because my work was me."

So is the great Janet Maslin responsible for ponderous early/mid-1970s Kinks efforts. like "A Soap Opera"? Scary thought, for her and for all journalists who inject their left-brain thinking into the right brains of our fave artistes....