Actors - Lola

Home > Listing Index > Actors > Lola (song)

	Actors - Lola

Lola is a popular song by the Kinks which details an encounter between a naive young man and a person named "Lola" in a Soho club. The single, taken from the album Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, was released in June, 1970, and reached #2 in the UK charts and #9 in the US.

Lyrical ambiguity

The song is controversial because there is a lingering question as to Lola's gender caused by the fact that the lyrics include several ambiguous passages. The question is whether Lola is a woman who looks and acts like a man or a man who looks, acts, and possibly even dresses like a woman (i.e. a transvestite).

One of the key lyrics is "I'm not dumb but I can't understand,/Why she walked like a woman and talked like a man" which many take to indicate that Lola is a man dressed as a woman even though it could just as easily mean that Lola is a very masculine woman.

But other lyrics such as "Girls will be boys and boys will be girls/It's a mixed up muddled up shook up world except for Lola" indicate that the song is more concerned with gender confusion. This is also supported by the notion in the song that the narrator is not the most manly man. The narrator is portrayed as naive, weak, and as having "never ever kissed a woman before." The narrator is obviously not, as he says in his own words "the world's most masculine man."

Immediately before the last chorus, the narrator sings, "Well I'm not the world's most masculine man/But I know what I am and I'm glad I'm a man/And so is Lola." Many take this last passage to be a specific indication that Lola is a man acting like a woman, but the problem is that this passage is syntactically ambiguous. This lyric could mean that the narrator “is a man” and that Lola is also a man. But the lyric could also mean that the narrator is “glad he's a man” and that Lola is also glad that the narrator is a man.

Some fans accept as a fact that Lola is a transvestite while others believe that the lyrics were left purposefully ambiguous. The lyrics on their own are inconclusive.

Inspiration for the song

In the book The Kinks: The Official Biography, Ray Davies says that he was inspired to write this song after his friend Robert Wace had spent the night dancing with a transvestite. Davies says “I remembered an incident in a club . . . Robert Wace had been dancing with this black woman, and he said, ‘I’m really on to a thing here.’ And it was OK until we left at six in the morning and then I said, ‘Have you seen the stubble?’ He said ‘Yeah,’ but he was too pissed to care, I think” (p 115).

Album version vs. the single release

Originally released as a single in the UK by Pye records in June of 1970

Pye 7N17961

The first single release of this song had to be censored slightly: not because of its controversial sexual content, but because of the mention of "coca cola" on the original version. The BBC refused to play the single because of this commercial reference, and so it was re-recorded with the phrase "cherry cola" instead.

A second rumor about the censorship also exists: that the reference to "coca cola" was in fact an underground term for cocaine, and therefore unacceptable for play on the BBC.

The altered single was available only in mono while the album version was available in stereo.

Covers and other versions

"Lola" was covered by The Raincoats on their 1979 album The Raincoats, and also by Madness on their 2005 album The Dangermen Sessions Vol. 1.

The song was also covered by Andy Taylor of Duran Duran in 1990.

In 1981, "Weird Al" Yankovic recorded a parody of the song, replacing "Lola" with the character Yoda from Star Wars.

In Yankovic's version, the line "I'm not dumb but I can't understand,/Why she walked like a woman and talked like a man," was replaced with "Well, I’m not dumb but I can’t understand, how he can lift me in the air just by raising his hand."

In 2004, brit pop-rock band McFly covered Lola, as a b-side on their first single.

Trivia

Soho and nearby locations in London feature in several of Ray Davies' other songs, including "Denmark Street" and "Life on the Road".

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Lola (song) ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Lola (song); it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.