Tynan's Anger

You can find out a lot about rock 'n' roll by comparing The Kinks version of "You Really Got Me" to Van Halen's cover. When the Kinks released the song around the time of oh, I don't know, "I Want To Hold Your Hand," it was already ahead of its time. Completelty lustful with nothing but teenage sex on the mind, it chose to approach the subject subtlety, with the danger in the subtext and expressed in double entendres and innuendo that allowed such an incendiary song to be played on the radio. Of course, when it did get onto the radio, it became more famous for its three chord garage rock stomp, perhaps the least original part of the song. Not suprisingly, the Kinks would go on to keep the subtext-dominant rock, but would never write such a hard rockin' song again after "All Day and All of the Night" or as it is also known, "You Really Got Me"-prime.

The Van Halen cover, however, exemplifies how metal fits in the rock canon. It takes all the subtext of the Kinks version and puts it into the forefront. Eddie Van Halen's guitar pummels the speakers in an obviously sexual manner. Where Ray Davies's vocals had only the barest tint of lasciviousness, David Lee Roth practically has an orgasm while singing it (from the "oomph" at the song's beginning through the heavy panting—male and female—following the solo). This kind of overt sexuality, where what you see is what you get, is why some feel such a rush in heavy metal, while others deride it as shallow and campy.

If you take a note by note comparison of the two covers, however, nothing is different. There's a slightly longer solo in the Van Halen version, but otherwise the structure's the same. What separates these two versions is not anything inherently musical, but something inherently anti-musical: the level of distortion in a guitar, the atonal inflections of a singer's voice, the production touches that are more for performance than anything else. I believe comparing these two covers gets to the real heart of what distinguishes rock 'n' roll from other forms of art and explains why rock criticism has a different tone from other forms of criticism: rock's medium is defined by precisely what goes against the ontology of its medium (sorry for that Meltzerism).

So anyhoo, Hillary chose to go with the Van Halen version for her bizarrely rock-laden intro video. That's cool, when you want to get the biggest applause, it's probably the best version to go with (buried in the DNC coverage was the fact that The Kinks' version of the song was used to introduce Wisconsin congresswoman/lesbian Tammy Baldwin, which seems appropriate I guess). You may say the song is too sexual for a political candidate, but anyone who's been to a sporting event in the last 25 years can tell you that screaming fans have an unparalleled ability to ignore innuendo (how else would inherently gay songs like "We Are The Champions" and "YMCA" get played in support of a celebration of testosterone).

But let's see how the other songs stack up: There were only two other rock songs, and both had weird things to say about H.R.C., the Demmycrats, and America in general. The first song after Van Halen was Lenny Kratiz's "Are You Gonna Go My Way?" That was a weird choice for a number of reasons. One, it was already clear we hadn't gone her way when the Dems nominated Obama. But more importantly, they found it safer to go with a song that's derivative of Jimi Hendrix instead of going with Hendrix himself. Was the problem the association with hippies and the perpetuation of the Culture Wars? Would that have been too sexual? Frankly, the absurdist in me was wishing they had played Hendrix's Woodstock performance of the Star Spangled Banner, but that may have been too obvious (for me and for the Dems).

Following that was another peculiar choice, Tom Petty's "American Girl." One the one hand, both the song's title and its opening verse story of a girl who "Tryin she had one little promise/ She was gonna keep" sounds fitting enough for a Hillary tribute video (and to borrow a phrase from Idolator, uses a rock star who's build a rock hall-worthy career off of being solid). But what would have happened if they had gone on to the second verse, where these words would have described the American Girl that is Hillary:

And for one desperate moment there
He crept back in her memory
God its so painful
Something thats so close
And still so far out of reach

In a campaign where sexism was undoubtedly a factor, it would not be in Hillary's best interest to depict herself still dependent on men (especially with the man she hangs around with). And while we're on the subject of feminism, what's with Hillary depicting herself as a "girl?" This happened both in the "girl/ you've really got me now" of Van Halen and with Tom Petty's "American Girl" schtick. But when was the last time you heard a 60-year-old woman be referred to as "girl" without it being in a demeaning, derogatory sense? I guess they were trying to show her softer, gentler side, which may be good after appearing like a hardass on the campaign trail (but what's the difference between hardass and empowered woman?). Strangely, a song that would have taken a more P.C. title,"American Woman," is one of the most notoriously misogynist songs in the rock canon (to bring this full circle, the song was covered by a seemingly oblivious Lenny Kravitz). Oh by the way, this was still not even close to the oddest setting for "American Girl" of the past year.

Thus, we see that in rock, the sexualized, perhaps objectified girl-woman becomes an empowered, liberated full-grown woman, while an explicitly tough, powerful women is the worst thing you can be (unless you're L7). Why else would a term like "girl power," which seems obscenely silly and borderline patronizing in any other context, be used in just about every article about feminism in rock 'n' roll? That sexualized nature of the woman in rock songs eventually transcends sexuality and turns into empowerment. Which is why, over 40 years after the Kinks first performed the song, we can now see a highly sexualized version of "You Really Got Me" in a national Democratic Party event promoting the first serious female candidate for president in our nation's history. How could Ray Davies have predicted that?

Labels: feminism, hillary clinton, lenny kravitz, the kinks, tom petty, van halen, you really got me