Moby made an offhand comment in The Guardian this weekend and accidentally lit a small fire. In the paper’s Honest Playlist column, the DJ and electronic musician revealed that “Lola” by the Kinks had come up on a Spotify playlist and he could not get through it. “I thought the lyrics were gross and transphobic,” he said. He did not quote specific lines or explain in much detail. He just dropped it and moved on.
The song in question is a 1970 hit in which narrator Ray Davies falls for someone named Lola at a club in Soho. The twist is right there in the chorus: “Girls will be boys and boys will be girls / It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, except for Lola.” Davies has said explicitly that he wrote the song after meeting a drag queen. He did research with drag performers. His intent was not to mock or exclude. His intent was to write something that acknowledged and humanized an experience that mainstream pop music was completely ignoring in 1970.
Music historians have treated “Lola” as an early LGBT-inclusive pop song for exactly this reason. It was not coded or hidden. It was right there on the surface, played on Top 40 radio, in an era when that was genuinely risky. The narrator does not recoil. The narrator falls in love.
Dave Davies, Ray’s brother and lead guitarist of the Kinks, responded over the weekend. He shared a statement from Jayne County, the pioneering transgender punk singer who has been a visible figure in music since the New York underground scenes of the late 1960s. County’s statement reads, in part: “When I heard the song I was both thrilled and amazed that the Kinks would be singing a song about a trans person and wondered if anyone else had picked up on it! A song that breaks down barriers and brings a used to be, hush, hush subject to the forefront and makes it sound perfectly natural to be singing a song about a ‘girl’ named Lola! Being Trans myself this will always be a very special song to me.”
County knows more about the history of trans representation in rock music than Moby does. That much is not in dispute. Her read on “Lola” – that it was a moment of recognition and warmth in a landscape that offered almost none – carries weight that an academic argument about lyrical intent cannot quite match.
Moby is not wrong to interrogate old songs. That is a reasonable thing to do. But “gross and transphobic” is a confident verdict for a song that transgender artists and historians have pointed to as an early example of trans visibility in pop. The fact that a straight white guy in 2026 finds it “unevolved” while actual trans musicians from that era remember it as a lifeline is the more interesting story here.
This is not about canceling Moby or defending the Kinks unconditionally. It is about the difference between interrogation and erasure. Lola has meant something real to real people for 56 years. That context matters.
This debate is quite interesting to me. In Russia we have similar arguments about old folk songs which contain attitudes that are no longer acceptable. ‘Lola’ is from 1970, yes? To judge old art entirely by today’s standards is a complicated philosophical problem. But also — Jayne County is someone who lived this history personally, as a trans woman and punk pioneer. Her opinion carries a weight that Moby’s, with respect, perhaps does not. I think we should read the actual lyrics carefully before condemning, and also listen to those who were there.
My uncle used to blast the Kinks on Sunday mornings, Lola included, and I can tell you nobody in our house was sitting there reading political subtext into it — we just loved the story. That’s the thing about Ray Davies, the man wrote characters. Lola isn’t a statement, it’s a snapshot, a bloke in a bar who’s confused and maybe charmed and doesn’t quite know what to do with himself. Now Moby’s a thoughtful guy and I respect his honesty for naming it on his playlist, but Jayne County’s been out there fighting those fights since before most of us knew the words existed. If she says the song doesn’t offend her, that carries some serious weight. Context matters, and so does who’s doing the contextualizing.