This is the age of machinery
A mechanical nightmare
The wonderful world of technology
Napalm hydrogen bombs biological warfare
As I’ve noted a couple of times in this series, the great Ray Davies was passionately, even fiercely nostalgic for the England he never really lived in, writing, sometimes a little tongue-in-cheek, sometimes less so, about village green preservation societies, empire, and the era of Queen Victoria, which he portrayed as a lost golden age, reigned over by a benevolent monarch – or at least he embodied a character who felt that way:
I was born, lucky me
In a land that I love
Though I’m poor, I am free
When I grow, I shall fight
For this land, I shall die
Let her sun never set
Land of hope and gloria
Land of my Victoria
Land of hope and gloria
Land of my Victoria
Victoria, ‘toria
Canada to India
Australia to Cornwall
Singapore to Hong Kong
From the West to the East
From the rich to the poor
Victoria loved them all
The song does imply, almost between the lines, that the everyman extolling the virtues of being English when the sun never set on the British Empire was, end of the day, buying a bill of goods while firmly grasping the shit-end, yet it’s all upbeat and celebratory, even anthemic. Back in the day, Ray seems to be saying, Britain was something an ordinary slob could really believe in, feeling part of something much bigger and far more glorious than himself.
None of that good-timey stuff with today’s hard-rocking selection, in which Ray isn’t merely wistful about the past, he’s frigging well enraged about the dismal present, forced to live in a modern technological hellscape of surveillance, oppressive bureaucracy, and diminished opportunity, all while living under the constant threat of everything being blown into radioactive dust by weapons of mass destruction. The middle eight is practically sung through clenched teeth:
I was born in a welfare state
Ruled by bureaucracy
Controlled by civil servants
And people dressed in grey
Got no privacy, got no liberty
‘Cause the twentieth century people
Took it all away from me
There’s nothing left anymore to believe in, and nothing to look forward to. He wishes only to get out. I’m a 20th century man, sings Ray, but I don’t want to die here.
Released in 1971 as the first cut and signature tune of Muswell Hillbillies, a very fine album which also included the sublime Oklahoma, USA – one of my nominees for saddest song ever written – 20th Century Man was widely ignored, received next to no airplay, and, like the album it opened, barely registered at all with the record-buying public. The critics loved it (as they still do), but nobody else seemed to pay it any mind, which must have been keenly disappointing after the success enjoyed just a year earlier by the cheeky but much less weighty Lola. Don’t get me wrong, Lola is a terrific song, rollicking good fun, eminently listenable, well ahead of it’s time thematically, and potentially controversial while still managing to be an enduring crowd pleaser. Who doesn’t like it?
But 20th Century Man is a statement, dammit, a manifesto even, written by somebody who understood what he was looking at, and knew damned well which way the trends were heading. You think Ray wasn’t on to something? Take a look around. Nothing’s getting better. Everything’s getting worse. It’s a f*&king dystopia out there. We’re ruled now by oligarchs, the bureaucrats dancing to their tune, as our options narrow and A.I. bids fair to throw us all out of work (but wait, who’ll buy your overhyped vehicles then, Elon?). Meanwhile our governments are on the cusp of becoming more invasive, intrusive, and authoritarian than they could even have dreamt of being back in 1971. The technology is terrifying. Never mind that we’re all carrying homing devices through which our whereabouts can be tracked in real time, or reconstructed later if anybody’s curious, we’re actually on camera half the time – and in some places, purportedly liberal democratic places, not just half. For example, I just read that there are now over 900,000 CCTV surveillance cameras through which the authorities monitor almost every step taken by all the citizens of London. Nine hundred thousand. In London, if you stagger out of a pub drunk at three in the morning, the cops know about it before you bump into your first lamp post. Smile half-wit, you’re on Telly, so best not to do anything embarrassing, right? They already know who you are, or if they don’t they’ll figure it out with their A.I.-powered facial recognition software. Shit, they’re probably looking through your second storey windows from their myriad high perches. Got no privacy, got no liberty.
Damn straight.
Oh, and those weapons of mass destruction? Yeah, they never went away. There’s still a shot they’ll get us before the A.I. disposes of us. While we wait and see, don’t forget, if you can talk to your frigging TVs and computers while barking requests at Alexa, that means the machines are listening. All day long.
The way this is all working out, supposing we survive, most of us are fixing to wind up about as free as Medieval serfs, only this time it’ll be the Tech Bros taking their tithes and scutage instead of the Lords and Clerics. We can’t say nobody warned us.
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In case anybody’s curious:
the needlefish 