Persona and Voice in the Kinks' Songs of the Late 1960s

Abstract

During the later 1960s, the Kinks wrote many songs confronting the dominant reception trope of reading the rock star as iconic ‘youth’ who ‘authentically’ presented his or her life on stage. The present article approaches this issue through Edward T. Cone's and other work on voice and persona in music. Several specific Kinks songs from the period are analysed, focusing on the divergence between vocal ‘protagonists’ and other personae or voices appearing in the music, which make it difficult to map the protagonists onto the writer/performer directly. The methods explored have broader implications for analysing rock songs as musical-cultural artefacts.