There’s a particular kind of cultural amnesia that’s become fashionable – the kind that listens to the past with the ears of the present and then scolds it for not already knowing what we know now. It’s neat, it’s righteous, and it’s usually wrong.
Which brings us to Lola and the latest flare-up involving Moby, who’s decided he can no longer stomach it, branding the song “gross and transphobic.”
That’s a strong accusation. It also collapses under even mild scrutiny.
Because if Lola is transphobic, then we’ve reached a point where the act of introducing ambiguity into mainstream culture is now being mistaken for hostility. And that’s not progress – that’s revisionism dressed up as virtue.
When Ray Davies wrote Lola, Britain wasn’t exactly a beacon of enlightened discourse. Homosexuality had only just been partially decriminalised. Gender identity wasn’t a panel discussion – it was a whispered risk. Soho wasn’t a lifestyle brand; it was a boundary zone.
And into that world walked a hit single – not some underground curio – a chart-smashing pop song about a young man meeting someone who unsettles everything he thought he knew about gender and attraction. Not hidden. Not coded beyond recognition. Broadcast. That matters.
Because cultural change doesn’t arrive fully briefed and sensitivity-trained. It arrives clumsy, curious, half-lit – and usually to the sound of a chorus people can hum.
Is the lyric awkward? Yes.
“Walked like a woman but talked like a man.”
Of course it is. It’s 1970. Language hadn’t caught up with lived reality, and it rarely does.
But here’s where the modern critique falls apart: that line isn’t the message. It’s the moment of destabilisation.
The narrator isn’t delivering a verdict – he’s losing his footing. The song isn’t punching down; it’s quietly pulling the rug out from under the bloke telling the story.
And by the end?
He doesn’t run.
He doesn’t moralise.
He doesn’t “correct” anything.
He stays.
That’s the twist. That’s the nerve. That’s why the song lasted.
Come and listen closely to the chorus:
“It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world / Except for Lola.”
That line flips the whole narrative. The world is confused. The narrator is confused. Lola isn’t.
She’s the most stable presence in the song – self-contained, magnetic, unbothered. The chaos belongs to the observer, not the observed.
So calling the song transphobic means missing the central inversion entirely. It’s like watching a film backwards and complaining the ending makes no sense.
While critics in 2026 clutch pearls, Jayne County – someone who actually lived the reality people are now theorising about – praised the song. Not tolerated it. Praised it as many others do.
She saw it for what it was: a mainstream record that cracked open a subject that had been buried under shame and silence.
That doesn’t make the song untouchable. But it does mean you don’t get to flatten it into a lazy accusation while ignoring the voices that actually lived it.
The Kinks - They've never left. They’re part of the air — perennial, unavoidable. Every day, somewhere between the noise and the silence, Dave Davies’ razored amplifier crackle cuts through and slips into your orbit, whether you asked for it or not.
For whatever reason, Moby attempts to hear Lola through a modern lens and finds it wanting.
Fine. That’s allowed, we suppose..
But instead of saying, “this feels dated to me,” he jumps to “this is transphobic.”
That leap is a problem. Because it rewrites intent, erases context, and collapses everything into a binary that didn’t exist when the song was written. It’s the cultural equivalent of opening a vinyl sleeve and complaining it doesn’t stream.
Worse, yes worse – it risks turning genuine progress into a kind of retroactive purity test, where anything imperfect is treated as suspect rather than understood as part of the road that got us here.
Here’s the truth no one likes because it’s not clean: Lola is imperfect. It uses language that maybe hasn’t aged well. It frames identity through surprise. It reflects a world still figuring itself out. But imperfection is not the same as prejudice.
If anything, Lola is a document of curiosity – of attraction pushing past assumption, of identity refusing to be neatly categorised, of a narrator discovering that desire doesn’t always follow the rules he was handed.
That’s not fear. That’s friction. And friction is where change happens.
If we start labelling songs like Lola as transphobic, we don’t just critique the past – we flatten it. And far too many people seem comfortable doing exactly that.
We erase the messy, human steps that led to greater visibility. We pretend that progress arrived fully formed, instead of being built out of half-understood moments like this one.
And we risk sending a strange message: that unless something is perfectly articulated by today’s standards, it has no value.
That’s not how culture works.
That’s how culture forgets.
Lola is a pop song – sly, catchy, subversive – that took a subject most people wouldn’t touch in 1970 and put it on the radio.
It didn’t solve anything. It didn’t need to. It opened a door and let people walk through it, humming.
There’s a difference between something that ages badly and something that was bad to begin with. Lola isn’t the latter.
If anything, it’s proof that even in a less enlightened time, music was already nudging the world forward – awkwardly, imperfectly, but undeniably.
And if that makes some modern listeners uncomfortable?
Good.
It means the song is still alive and The Kinks are still relevant – unlike some others…