Today’s Brew: Existentialism, English pop, and a shared birthday
June 21st isn’t just the solstice. It also happens to be the birthday of two men who couldn’t have looked more different at a glance: Jean-Paul Sartre, the left-bank philosopher who gave us existentialism and a scowl so permanent it looked inherited; and Ray Davies, the sardonic, silver-penned frontman of The Kinks, who sang about English life with the tragicomic clarity of someone who could see right through the wallpaper.
What could they possibly have in common, besides a cake and some candles? Quite a lot, it turns out.
Let’s start with THE OUTSIDER. Both Sartre and Davies were fascinated – obsessed, really – with the figure of the misfit. For Sartre, alienation was the fundamental human condition. You wake up one day and realise no one is coming to explain the point of your existence. There’s no God, no rulebook, no script. It’s all on you, and that can make a man sick to his stomach. Literally. Nausea was Sartre’s word for the spiritual queasiness that follows this awareness.
Ray Davies didn’t need to read Being and Nothingness to know something was wrong. Just listen to Waterloo Sunset or Shangri-La or A Well-Respected Man. His songs are full of lonely souls, window-gazers, girls named Lola and gents who cross-dress in Soho to escape the stifling grip of suburban expectation. He didn’t write songs about rebellion as much as he wrote about retreat – into fantasy, nostalgia, or bemused resignation. They were both deeply allergic to falseness. Sartre called it “bad faith”: that terrible human habit of pretending we’re not free by hiding behind roles: the waiter who acts like a robot, the bourgeois who believes their moral comfort proves righteousness. Ray, in his more melancholy register, sang about “people so busy, they make me feel dizzy,” spinning around in routines and expectations, never stopping to wonder why.
Both men were cultural revolutionaries in their own way, too, though one was brandishing a lit Gauloise and a copy of Le Monde, and the other a guitar and a pair of smart trousers. Sartre stirred up postwar politics and took the Left Bank by storm, refusing the Nobel Prize on principle. Ray Davies, meanwhile, refused the mod aesthetic and the Beatles’ optimistic sheen. While the rest of the world was swinging, he was penning elegies for crumbling Englishness. Not quite punk, not quite pop. Something else entirely: a middle-finger wrapped in a melody.
And then there’s freedom; the cornerstone of Sartre’s philosophy. We are, he insisted, condemned to be free. No excuses. No cosmic script. Only choice, and the responsibility that comes with it. Davies, ever the kitchen-sink chronicler, seemed to wonder what freedom looked like when the council flat door creaked shut. His characters were offered new worlds; consumer culture, sexual revolution, bigger houses, and found the price too high or the thrill too fleeting. In Shangri-La, a man finally gets his dream house, only to find himself imprisoned by its mortgage and its lawn.
You could say Sartre gave us the diagnosis: freedom without meaning leads to dread. Davies gave us the case studies, men and women choking on their tea in neatly manicured cages. Imagine the two of them in a pub or café, depending on who chose the venue. Sartre grumbles about colonial guilt and the absurd, Ray hums a half-finished verse about the girl who works at the grocer’s and dreams of Piccadilly. They don’t talk much. But you can feel the recognition.
So here’s to the patron saints of existential awkwardness, both born on the longest day of the year. One stared into the abyss. The other made it rhyme.
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