'The Kinks Invent Heavy Metal!!!!', or so the usual headlines surrounding 'You Really Got Me' would have us believe, but I'm not buying it. "You got me so I don't know what I'm doing, now. Oh yeah, you really got me now, you got me so I can't sleep at night"; metal is too macho and testosterone laced for such weakness over - pffft - a girl. A one night stand or quick fumble in the back of the car maybe, but luv and romance? Nah, it's not going to happen.*That's not to say that 'You Really Got Me' is not the first of....something. One thing that can't be denied is that it's loud. Bloody loud. Dave Davies' guitar was overload loud before he slit his amplifier speaker cone to add a rasp that makes the strings sound less like they're being strummed by hand and more like they're being scrubbed with a dirty wire broom head. Uncommercial and uncompromising, this was a brave move for a band on the verge of being dropped by their label after their first two singles flopped, and this would have doubtless sunk too had there not been a song behind it all.
Because what I love most about 'You Really Got Me' is not that fuzzy riff but the way brother Ray winds himself up into a frenzy as his confusion and irritation grows from a coy opening to an ever tightening coil ("Girl, you really got me going, you got me so I don't know what I'm doing") over the pile up of guitars until he's left with no room to turn and is forced into a repetitive, anti-orgasm snarl of anger/self disgust ("You really got me. You REALLY got me. YOU REALLY GOT ME") to release the tension. And then it all starts again from scratch.
Sexy and violent, hard and filthy - what 'You Really Got Me' actually does is bring garage rock and some good old fashioned carnal lust to the masses with no concession to niceties. This isn't the pop craft of The Beatles - Ray doesn't want to just hold this girl's hand (and we don't know if she'd ever let him anyway - the girl's view on all this is not noted. Ray probably doesn't see it as relevant), his intentions are rather more base and the brutal onslaught of the music provides a setting worthy of such one sided statements of frustration. There's a sexually raw element of danger here not seen since the early days of Elvis and the gang and it's a ball The Rolling Stones (and countless others) would shortly be booting into the net on a regular basis, making 'You Really Got Me' the double clunk sound of one bar being raised while simultaneously another is lowered.
* Eighties poodle rock maybe, and it's no co-incidence that uber pretty boys Van Halen recorded a version of this where the guitars sound like they've been through a car wash and Dave Lee Roth hams the lyric as a tool of seduction. I don't like.
No comments:
Post a Comment