Rockcrit and A-Mama Ann Powers thinks way too hard sometimes

Monday, January 09, 2006

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....

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

At least in the case of this journalist--you--I am pretty confident that you will not abuse that kind of "power!"

8:52 PM

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ducks, Ducks, Ducks on the Wall!!

8:43 AM

 
Blogger Sean Nelson said...

who will he blame for "Think Visual"?

1:36 PM

 

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