7 August 1970
As with my few lines on ‘All About That Bass’, I don’t have personal experience or insight that would give me any sort of informed view on the themes raised by ‘Lola’. Similarly, some people with that personal experience and insight could have found it helpful and some could have found it harmful. Maybe some would even argue it’s more complex than that.
All that said, I have qualms about this song. That evocative opening line and catchy chorus aside, I wonder if a lot of its success is because a mainstream listenership took ‘Lola’ as something like a comic sketch. After all, it’s a story with a set-up and reveal, one that maps onto traditional gags about naive young men in the big city and their encounters in bars. Some of the lyrics, especially those with characteristics and spoken words attributed to Lola, feel like witticisms to amuse the listener rather than insights to empathise with the characters. Finally, taking a sardonic observational view of summer-afternoon-lazing country-house dwellers and Carnaby Street followers of fashion is one thing, but applying the same filter to a marginalised and ill-treated minority, whose existence in England had only been decriminalised three years earlier, feels like a laugh at their expense.
Anyway, that’s how I feel about ‘Lola’. Dad-rockers and ‘Fairytale Of New York’ fundamentalists, assemble.
