Talk:Village Green (song)/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Premeditated Chaos (talk · contribs) 19:31, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Dibsing, I usually get to reviews within a week, but please ping if I don't. &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 19:31, 17 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Hey PMC. No rush, you just mentioned to ping you if it's been over a week. Luckily it gave me more time to reorganize the page a little cleaner and include another source.  Tkbrett  (✉) 21:11, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

Really sorry, thanks for pinging me! Post-COVID symptoms were making it hard to sit down and focus on anything that needed actual attention. Here we go. My typical review style is to make comments in the vein of an FA review, albeit less picky (I don't go after ref formatting for example). I tend to be a wonk about conciseness in prose. I am open to discussion on most things if you disagree with my thoughts.


 * Lead
 * For the ignorant among us, can we get brief context for Ray Davies? (This is probably going to come up again, it's kind of a thing for me - I like to see enough context around names and concepts that people don't have to stop reading and click through to another article to know what's being talked about. Something like "Frontman Ray Davies" or "lead songwriter Ray Davies" is fine, your discretion)
 * I went with "the band's principal songwriter".


 * "recorded during the sessions for Something Else by the Kinks (1967), first in November 1966 before being re-recording in February 1967." - "being re-recording" is a typo, and "first in November 1966" sounds odd. Can I suggest "first recorded in November 1966 during the sessions..."?
 * Yes, that will work. The awkward sentence structure was because I was worried about implying the February 1967 sessions did not also coincide during the Something Else sessions.


 * Context for David Whitaker
 * Added.


 * Background
 * Lovely image
 * I thought so too.


 * "the English rock band" - "the" is unnecessary here I think
 * I'm not a Brit so British English isn't intuitive for me. I believe you're correct.


 * Why were they blacklisted?
 * The source (Hinman 2004, p. 60) writes that the promoter at a San Francisco concert on 4 July 1965 complained to the AFM about the Kinks' "unprofessional behaviour". He says that "[t]his in part will cause the informal blacklisting". Hinman is as reliable as it gets with the Kinks, so I'm happy to go with his explanation, but just know that the story does seem to go deeper – it's covered in part in the Kinks' FA. I'd rather not have the article spin off into a tangent of all this other hypotheses though.
 * I agree, we don't need a huge amount of detail here. Maybe we could put "blacklisted due to unprofessional behavior"? Just so there's a smidge of context.
 * Added. How does that look?


 * Link English aristocracy maybe?
 * Done.


 * "country-lifestyle" - doesn't need the hyphen
 * Fixed.


 * No big, but you used "further" in two successive sentences
 * Avoided repetition.


 * I won't die on this hill, but I think the last sentence wants splitting up, since it combines something he was for-sure inspired by and something he was maybe inspired by
 * Agreed. I've split things up. I'm just trying to figure out how to improve the wording so the paragraph doesn't just plod through all the different sources of inspiration.


 * Recording
 * Love the detail about the recording process, nice and clear
 * Thank you!


 * Who's Miller? You've only got a last name here and ctrl+F shows it's the first time he's mentioned (I see you mention and link him later - just need to move that up)
 * Done.


 * I am so interested in this block quote about tricking Mick Avory. Is there any way to fit some context, perhaps in the background section, as to why he would've had to do that?
 * It was pretty typical for Ray's process at that time, seemingly because he was paranoid that if he shared the lyrics or melody with even his bandmates, the song would end up stolen before they could finish it. I covered this a bit in the album's article. Instead of just having it in the quotebox on this article, I've moved it into the body to explain the weirdness. How does that look?
 * Looks great. There is honestly nothing weirder than intra-band drama, I swear. This is my own curiosity and not GA related, but did any of the bandmates ever actually steal his music, or was he just paranoid as hell?
 * I don't think he was worried about his bandmates specifically, so much as he was afraid that sharing his songs with would result in them somehow being stolen. It doesn't sound like it ever happened. He did however get screwed by the band's former manager and former publisher, who each sued Ray for most of his songwriting earnings in the late 1960s. Beginning in 1965, all of that money sat in escrow before it was finally released to him in 1970 when he won all his court cases. Record companies and publishers are truly some of the scummiest players around, willing to ruin relationships like Lennon & McCartney or screw around Taylor Swift all for some money.


 * Composition
 * You could safely tweak the image caption to just say "The recording prominently features a harpsichord...", I think readers will understand
 * Done.


 * Minor repetitiveness in the last paragraph - "Author Ken Rayes thinks the song... " followed by "thinks is hinted at" in the same sentence.
 * Fixed.


 * Release
 * "An acetate disc from around April 1967 paired the song with "Waterloo Sunset", but Davies replaced it before "Waterloo Sunset" could be released as a single the following month.[42]" I find myself confused by this sentence. Did the acetate disc get released? Or was it canned before release as this seems to suggest?
 * Acetates were typically used during the production process when the record label was figuring out the details of the finished product. In this case, there's an April 1967 acetate pairing "Waterloo Sunset" with "Village Green" as its B-side. But in May 1967, when "Waterloo Sunset" was officially released as a single, it had a different song for its B-side. That's what I'm trying to get across here. I've reworded it to make that clearer.
 * Ahh, okay. So basically a prototype was made and then they did something else. It's clearer now, thanks.


 * "later aborted" - needs a hyphen, I think
 * Done.


 * I don't know if "sequenced as" is necessary, although I don't care enough to die on the hill if you're attached to the phrasing
 * I think in this case it's helpful to have, since the song's appearance on the twelve-track album was as the opening track of a side – when LPs were still the dominant format, they were sequenced to have the best songs as side openers or closers.
 * Oh no, I wasn't objecting to including the actual track placement information. Just that I don't think it's necessary to say "sequenced as" when you can just say "as the opening track".
 * Oh, I see. Done.


 * Reception
 * Are there any more contemporary reviews? I noticed there's just the one, and the rest is after-the-fact.
 * The reviews I've mentioned in the critical reception section of the album's article are secondhand from Doug Hinman's 2004 book, where he discusses each reviewer's general assessment regarding the album as a whole, but not reviews on individual tracks. Keith Altham's piece is the only UK review I've been able to get a hold of off WorldRadioHistory.com – the others aren't on it. I'm in Canada, so none of the libraries around here carry the British music magazines in their archives. Even if they did, 1960s music criticism sucks, so I doubt we'd find much of value anyway. There's typically little in the way of actual criticism, but instead only a simple description of how the song sounds. As for US reviews, the two big ones (Robert Christgau and Paul Williams) don't mention the song specifically.
 * No problem, we can only say what the sources give us.


 * The lines about the Hot Fuzz feature are a bit awkwardly written. The second sentence seems to imply that the murder thing is in the song, but of course that's the movie and the song has no murder. Just needs to be reworded a bit.
 * I've tweaked the phrasing.

Overall this is a really well-written article, and the majority of my suggestions are fairly minor. It could easily be an FA candidate, so I hope that's in the works. On a spot check I didn't see anything concerning from the online sources, no CV or close paraphrasing noted. Offline sources taken on GF, but no concerns about reliability overall. Images are appropriate and properly licensed. &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 21:13, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks very much . I hope you've been feeling better. I appreciate your kind words and your helpful criticism, especially as I'm a fan of some of your work. I've been working on a bunch of articles related to The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society in the hopes of making it a good topic. Let me know if there's anything else regarding this article you think would sharpen it up, even beyond the GA criteria; I think I may follow your recommendation and nominate it for featured status once this review is completed, as I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out.  Tkbrett  (✉) 22:43, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
 * , a few responses to stuff needing attention, otherwise everything else looks great. Side note: A fan! I'm going to blush about that for a week :) &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 19:48, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
 * , thanks again. Responses are above.  Tkbrett  (✉) 13:02, 29 August 2022 (UTC)


 * And we're good to go! Ping me if you FAC it, I'll pop over and comment. &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 18:17, 29 August 2022 (UTC)