The Kinks / Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One (Deluxe Edition) [2020 Stereo Remaster] / 1970
Lola
buoyant, comic, tender, with an undertow of confusion and vulnerability
Video: The Kinks on YouTube
Lyrics
Met her in a club down in old Soho
Where you drink champagne and it tastes just like coca cola
C-O-L-A, Cola
She walked up to me and she asked me to dance
I asked her her name and in a dark brown voice she said Lola
L-O-L-A, Lola
La-la-la-la Lola
Well, I'm not the world's most physical guy
Showing 8 of 62 lines -- this excerpt supports the analysis alongside it. Read the full lyric on Genius.
Lyrics via LRCLIB (community-contributed). Rights remain with the songwriters and publishers.
The analysis
A naive young man recounts his disorienting, thrilling encounter with Lola, a nightclub companion whose gender identity destabilizes his own certainties. The song turns a potentially crude novelty premise into a warm, funny, oddly tender coming-of-age story that ends in acceptance rather than panic.
gender fluidity and identity sexual awakening innocence versus experience urban nightlife as liminal space self-acceptance
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator, young and inexperienced, addressing the listener directly as he retells the night; he's an unreliable innocent, more reliable in his feelings than in his understanding of what's happening to him
What happens
The song moves from a chance meeting on a dance floor through mounting physical and emotional confusion, to a moment of panic and retreat, and finally to a settled, almost triumphant acceptance of the strange romance and of his own identity within it.
How it's built
Verse-chorus pop structure built on repetition of the title as a hook, with the chorus's insistent spelling and la-la refrain acting like a chant that mimics infatuation. The bridge marks a formal and emotional swerve — a moment of physical stumbling matched by short, halting lines — before the song returns to the chorus with a changed understanding, ending in extended vamping repetition that suggests intoxication or resignation.
Section by section
Opening verse
Sets the scene in a bohemian club, establishing a heightened, theatrical world where champagne substitutes for cola, cluing the listener that not everything here is quite as advertised.
First chorus
Introduces Lola through sound rather than description, letting the drawn-out spelling suggest fascination and hesitation at once.
Second verse
The narrator's self-deprecating asides about his own unremarkable masculinity work comically while quietly setting up the identity questions that follow; the mismatch he notices between how Lola moves and sounds is delivered almost as an aside, softening what could be shock into curiosity.
Third verse / near-seduction
Physical intimacy escalates, and his admission of almost succumbing shows real emotional investment rather than mere novelty.
Bridge
Short, stumbling lines dramatize a crisis: he pulls back, physically collapses, and the tension resolves not into rejection but into eye contact and calm resolve.
Reflective chorus
The mixed-up-world line functions as thesis statement, generalizing the specific encounter into commentary on the fluidity of categories generally, with Lola positioned as an exception or exemplar rather than an anomaly to be explained away.
Closing verse
He reveals his own inexperience explicitly, and Lola's promise to make him a man reframes the whole song as his initiation; his closing declaration of being glad in his own identity resolves the tension with contented self-knowledge rather than anxiety.
Outro vamp
The extended repetition of the name suggests intoxication, obsession, or simply the giddy loop of memory replaying the night.
Craft
- spelling-out refrain
- Spelling the name and the word for the drink slows down the line, giving both a comic, sing-song quality and mimicking a kind of drunken emphasis or a child sounding out something unfamiliar.
- understatement/litotes
- The narrator repeatedly qualifies himself with phrases like not being especially physical or passionate, which lets him admit vulnerability without overclaiming feeling, and gives the song its self-deprecating humor.
- synecdoche of the body
- Physical details — a strong grip, a voice, a walk — stand in for the character's ambiguous gender presentation, letting the song describe identity through sensation rather than direct statement.
- chiasmus
- The crossed construction about walking one way and talking another, and later about girls and boys swapping roles, formally enacts the theme of reversed or blended gender categories.
- volta
- The physical stumble and kneeling passage functions as a turn, shifting the song from disorientation to acceptance.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a sympathetic, if of-its-time, portrait of gender ambiguity that resolves in acceptance: the narrator's confusion gives way to affection and self-assurance, and the song's humor works in his favor rather than at Lola's expense. An alternative reading focuses on the ambiguity as a joke aimed at the listener, playing coyness for titillation rather than genuine empathy — the song never fully clarifies Lola's identity, and some hear that vagueness as evasion rather than tenderness.
Context
This is a well-known single from 1970, widely understood as one of the first mainstream pop hits to engage openly with a transgender or gender-nonconforming character, though the songwriter's precise intentions and any specific biographical inspiration are not something I can state with certainty.
Listen for
- the drawn-out spelling of the chorus and how it mimics fascination
- the shift in vocal delivery during the bridge's short clipped lines
- the self-deprecating asides that undercut the narrator's bravado
- the repeated exceptions to the 'mixed-up world' line, positioning Lola outside general confusion
- the extended vamping outro and what it implies about obsession or comfort