Some sweet irony has Ray Davies posted on [the cover of Preservation Act 2] as a demagogic hustler when his refusal to merchandise himself has long impeded widespread recognition of the Kinks.

Because Ray, on this album, mingles his persona as a reluctant rock star and querulous love object with the characters of Flash, Mr. Black and the Tramp (with a bogglingly well-realized cameo as Flash's Special Floosie Belle), then marches these composite characters into a scenario that clicks (musically and narratively) with Preservation Act 1: because that scenario is informed by a superbly intuited moral sense of history, utterly germane to this year of deposed monarchies; and because the whole thing rocks, rolls and saunters its way across four sides, Ray cannot be denied his place as rock's ascendant genius.

Think about the congruence between Ray's morality play and the musical theatre of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, specifically their collaboration, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Germany was in upheaval when Mahagonny premiered in 1930. The production aimed for impact, with Weill drawing musical motifs from the cabarets and Brecht staging the performance to jar and alienate the audience, a principle of his politicized commitment. The whiteface make-up and repellent grin Ray sports on the cover are very much emblems of Brechtian theatre today; walking on Weill's side, Ray has always confessed his music-hall influences, and the scoring of the hand-picked female voices on Preservation is often reminiscent of the pallid cynicism with which Brecht coated his tawdry characters.

We could ask why Ray is in a cowboy hat, a mark of the amoral slickster since well before Brecht set his story on the American frontier. There's more: the "holocaust risin' over the horizon" in "There's A Change In The Weather" (Preservation Act 1) is a perfect analogue to a hurricane that threatens Mahagonny, but both storms disappear as the respective towns give themselves over to anarchic materialism. Flash is set upon by his soul as he sleeps, just as Moses descends on Maha-gonny—Flash, facing Hell Fire, confesses. Brecht won't allow his city that eschatological dive. They kill Moses, figuring they're already in hell. Both stories end with the populace in factional riots.

So what? Just that a rock writer capable of the melting lyricism of "Waterloo Sunset" has had burgeoning within him a mordantly Marxist epic, and he has instinctively infused it with ideologues and social archetypes, and written compelling music for it, then driven the message home with a brilliant catalogue of his own vocal effects. It has the capacity of becoming the most effective populist 'musical' around for a long time, even as it arises out of a genre which has become the Saturday circus for a generation struck numb by television. (p. 69)

[Right] now we have from Ray a conception so prepossessing that it's milked a masterpiece six sides long from him. And he's giving us a very good idea just where all the good times have gone. (p. 70)