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Thursday, February 07, 2008
THIS IS WHERE I BELONG
The Kinks
1967
Available on : The Kink Kronikles
Reprise : 1972
[Buy It]
THIS IS WHERE I BELONG
Bill Lloyd
Set To Pop
East Side Digital : 1994
[Buy It]
THIS IS WHERE I BELONG
Frank Black
Headache 10"
4AD: 1994
[Buy It]
THIS IS WHERE I BELONG
Ron Sexsmith
Available on : This Is Where I Belong: The Songs of Ray Davies & The Kinks
Rykodisc : 2002
[Buy It]
YOU BELONG TO ME
Rev. Tom Frost
South of Hell, France
Closed For Private Party : 2005
[Out of Print]
It's hard to like the Kinks because of Wes Anderson. No. I said it wrong. What I mean is that these days it's hard to make sense of exactly how much I like the glory period of the early career of the Kinks, in part because the cultural overtones of those songs have become highly specific as a result of their inclusion in a number of mostly excellent Wes Anderson films. Everyone knows what I mean, right? This is just an introductory paragraph and I don't want it to get too clotted. Suffice it to say that "Nothin' in This World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl" used to mean a tremendous amount to me, and now it means something to me about Rushmore. The same goes for "Powerman" and The Darjeeling Limited. I come neither to praise nor to bury him. I just want to--need to--note that he and his production designers have a way of interfering with my pristine experience of a few Kinks songs. Then I will get on to "This is Where I Belong."
"This is Where I Belong," one of Ray Davies' most perfectly realized compositions, was originally released as the B-side to a Dutch single in April of 1967, which is the rough equivalent of James Joyce publishing "Araby" in the back of a program for a boat show. "And that is why we consider ourselves the premier inflatable boatworks in the Pacific Northwest. . . North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free." Later on, the song's obscurity was rectified when it was included on the 1972 compilation The Kink Kronicles, and it has also been on subsequent expanded CD versions of the great LP Face to Face. The song is sad, joyous, short, and eternal, as Davies explains everything he knows about devotion, which also happens to be everything everyone else will ever need to know. This is an exaggeration, but not by much:
I can't think of a place I'd rather be
The whole wide world doesn't mean so much to me
For this is where I belong
This is where I belong
Tell me now if you want me to stay
It don't matter, cause I'd stay here anyway
For this is where I belong
This is where I belong
Well, I ain't gonna wander
Like the boy I used to know
He's a real unluckly fella
And he's got no place to go
I won't search for a house upon a hill
Why should I when I'd only miss you still
For this is where I belong
This is where I belong
This is where I belong When a song is this eloquent, there's not very much left to say. What I can say is that I was thinking of it most of the week, because I had two conversations with friends about relationships that seemed to be entering phrases of difficulty. (Phases of difficulty, I mean. I wish this thing had a backspace.) The situations are entirely different from one another, but one of the principal issues in each case was the feeling of belonging. The people who came to talk to me, one man and one woman, both questioned whether their partners could successfully keep them in the relationship, not sexually or financially but emotionally. One person said, "I wonder if she can locate me there," which seemed like a slightly incorrect use of the word "locate," or at least a slightly stagy one, but I got the gist. The other person said, "I sometimes think I should be elsewhere, and that's wrong. I want to want to be there. That's the gist." She saved me from having to talk about the gist of her remarks by actually using the word "gist," and for that I am grateful. Both of them, after articulating their discontent, asked me what they should do. I had no idea, but I had some ideas. The one I shared most readily was this one: make sure you are somewhere you belong. This is very vague and bromidic and almost meaningless unless I supply a few details, so I will. The woman was for many years a normal New Yorker who did not cook. Then about a year ago, just before she met and began to date her boyfriend, she started to read cookbooks and try recipes. They went out to dinner on the first date, but on the second date she had him over and prepared a meal. As the relationship went forward, he demonstrated insufficient enthusiasm for her cooking. "It's not that I wanted him to like what I did, necessarily," she said. "But I wanted him to participate wholly." Instead, he told her not to worry so much about it, that they could just as easily go out or order in. "It is coming to feel like rejection, not sexual but not completely non-sexual," she said. "There I am, willing to put a hot plate on the table, and he just won't eat my cooking."
He won't eat her cooking. In other cases, there are other things people will not eat, or touch, or share, or watch, or place between them and discuss. The idea of belonging is made up of a thousand specifics, but you should always be able to elevate over it, look down, and see if it is intact. If it is not--if the plate is being pushed away--there is cause for more than a little concern. There is an end to the story already written, and all that needs deciding is how long the final chapters are. Once, when I was younger, I tried to forestall a breakup by telling a woman, "You know what I really like? Sitting on the couch with you eating crappy food and watching TV and having a stupid conversation about nothing much at all, and then having sex." I didn't say "having sex." I said something more pointed. I was trying for a show of force. I also didn't say "making love." I was shy to do that.
"What about the crumbs?" she said. "You know, from the crappy food? Won't they get on our backs and asses?" She had a point. We had been fighting but not really fighting. We had been drifting. And after a little drifting, we reached opposite shores. They were not so far away that we were unable to see or hear each other, but I was thinking about what lay behind me, or beyond her. I was searching for a house upon a hill. The whole wide world meant too much to me.
A little while after that, I was telling another girl about the problems in the previous relationship, and she was telling me about the problems in her current one. They were common problems: boy won't do this, girl won't do that, brains and mouths and hands aren't being used to their best advantage, no one knows how anyone feels. We were sitting in my apartment, watching TV and eating crappy food. I wasn't thinking about having sex with her, and we didn't. But at some point in the conversation, one or the other of us sighed, and it was clear that the thought of belonging had just passed through the room. It warmed us and then chilled us, and went unacted upon. Shyness. Much, much later, after I had dated another woman for a little while, I had a dream about that second woman. In the dream, we were sitting on the couch again, and the sense of belonging was heavy in the room. We had just had sex, off-camera. Still some shyness.
I have drifted a bit from the song, which is unfair. The brilliance of the lyric is everywhere, but it is most specifically located in the way that Davies conflates emotional and physical space. The "this" where he belongs moves through time, obviously. Love has to move through time or it is something else entirely: convenience or delusion. But it also moves through space, and when he says "I'd stay here anyway," he really means that he'll go anywhere so long as she goes. It's the song of a fellow traveler, not a non-traveler.
The song enacts this principle. It travels well. In fact, one of the testaments to the greatness of "This is Where I Belong" is that it is virtually indestructible when placed in the hands of a capable interpreter. Here I offer three examples: a lapidary little version by Bill Lloyd (though he changes the "I won't search" line, not for the better), a rough-and-tumble treatment by Frank Black (also has problems searching for the house upon the hill; he gets a little too emotive after searching and disrupts the song's smooth surface), and a majestically mournful cover by Ron Sexsmith that rivals the original. "This Is Where I Belong" has close relatives: Bob Dylan's "She Belongs to Me," Rickie Lee Jones's "We Belong Together," Love's "Your Mind and We Belong Together," even the Dirtbombs' "Your Love Belongs Under a Rock." There is "You Belong to Me," the fifties standard that was made famous by Patti Page and Jo Stafford and then made less famous by the Rev. Tom Frost, and whose argument replaces Davies's expansive generosity with an equally expansive possessiveness. So there are plenty of other songs about belonging. And at the same time, there are no other songs about belonging. I now appeal to Wes Anderson to leave it out of all future films. Much as I like Jason Schwartzman, I don't want to see him scaling the steps of a townhouse, a bouquet of perfectly arranged and colored flowers in his hand, electric piano riff wobbling in the air alongside him.
There is very much more to say about the difficulty (and importance) of belonging to another person. Limits must be set so that you do not vanish inside him or her. Dignity must be maintained so that you do not ask to belong to a club that will only have you as a member after a request has been made. Tactics must be employed to ensure that your mind roams without wandering. But these are gnomic precepts that don't advance the case much beyond where Ray Davies left it in 1967, in Holland, on a B-side.Labels: ben, kinks
posted by Ben
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