A Little Gender Identification
By ice rivers
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We were listening to the radio when these two songs came on back to back....."Lola" and "All Day and All of the Night"
Seems like it's time for a little gender identification.
I'm heterosexual, monogamous male.
Women are irreplacable and irresistible.
I am married so my further attractions are asexual.
Looking back after listening to those two songs, I'm amazed at the distance we've traveled in the realm of gender identification.
When All Day and All of the Night came out, everybody took it as a heterosexual song. It's what we call a boner song, written by a guy whose trying to get laid and has pitched a tent in his slacks that he's trying to unload with utmost urgency. It's a youthful and exuberant song full of testeronic frenzy, need and despair.
Lynn and I have been spending all day and all of the night with each other for the past 31years. As all married couples know, it's no picnic unless you're picniking on a roller coaster. I am an exhausting and exhausted person who is overwhelmed by even the most basic responsibilties and thus reliant on my wife who can get sick and tired of my learned helplessness while she maintains a level of organization/fastidiousness, righteous anger and control that sits on the edge of obsession while I sit on the couch.
Meanwhile my semi-annual erections have become my annual semi-erections which I suppose have arrived just in time and as a form of relief for her menopausal sojourn.
Seventy year olds aren't writing a lot of boner songs.
Yet, we are more in love than ever although pizza pies are no longer hitting us in the eyes and we sometimes drink too much wine.
We are healthy, wealthy and wise.
We don't need tents anymore.
The first song, "Lola" is quite an amazing song when you think about it in relation to the time that it was released when trans anything was considered by the ruling heterosexual identifiers as weird at best and probably sick and possibly criminal. Then Ray Davies told the story of an adventure in Old Soho about Lola.
It was the start of something big.
Nowadays, we can't and shouldn't assume anything about anybody. This is becoming clearer every single day which leads to confusion which leads to discovery while the world turns into Soho
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Comments
Two of my favourite songs,
Two of my favourite songs, and I have happy memories of singing along to Lola at a Kinks concert when a very drunk Ray Davies sprayed the first few rows - including me - with beer. Happy Days!
Now I have to come back to the present, put my editor's hat on and say, sadly, we're going to have to ask you take the direct quote from Lola out of the piece. Under copyright law the only part of a song you're allowed to quote is the title, unless you have direct permission to use the lyrics. It's a real pain, and something that comes up a lot on ABC Tales, because song lyrics are so good at capturing meanings, moods, emotions etc. However, we can't afford to get sued!
We're given 24 hours to take them down, so if you could remove just that bit as soon as possible, we'd be very grateful.
Many thanks.
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That's great - thank you so
That's great - thank you so much for being so understanding.
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This is a really interesting
This is a really interesting and amusing piece of writing about a great lyricist and which has introduced me to the term 'boner song'. I shall spend the rest of today going through my ever expanding music collection to categorise each item as boner or non-boner.
With many of his songs, Ray Davies was way ahead of his time. The words of Apeman (from the same album as Lola) are probably more relevent today than when they were written.
I only hope that Mr Davies doesn't go stealing your words the next time he's writing a song.
Turlough
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