It’s just astonishing, isn’t it, how song lyrics stay the same as they were written.
And regardless of whatever impression Moby gets from this song, it sounds to me like the narrator finds out that Lola is a man but he’s into it anyway, and it’s basically a love song expressing tender feelings for this trans woman that he met down in old Soho.
Now you’ve got me rethinking Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.”
This seems reasonable. I think a lot of people are still trying to reconcile the best way to enjoy and recognize the importance of past works with contemporary sensibilities. It’s perfectly okay if someone doesn’t think it’s their cup of tea.
Now?, I made the obvious connection the first time I heard the song as an adult… (wait, does that mean that I have a dirty mind?)
I was 13 when the song came out and I think I made the connection a year or two later.
As far as “Lola” is concerned, I never interpreted it as saying anything negative about her. I always interpreted Lola as being a transvestite rather than transgender. In part because transgender wasn’t part of my lexicon back in the late 80s when I would have first heard the song.
Most of the times I’ve heard that song on the radio they cut that verse.
In the intervening decades the BBC have employed some people who do know what that term means 
That makes sense, I did not make the connection as a teen because I couldn’t understand the English Lyrics 
Though, now that I think about it, I would’ve probably not understood the subtext so early, I’ve always been a bit slow with innuendo.
As an American I didn’t know what “finger pie” meant in the Penny Lane lyrics. Did they play that on BBC radio?
Yup though that’s a double entendre which they are generally much more happy with. And a relatively subtle one at that, I was obsessed with both the Beatles and double entendres as a British teenager, and never got that particular one (fish sticks are called fish fingers in the UK, so I assumed it was a working class thing in Liverpool to pad out real fish with fish fingers in a pie)
It’s also a class thing. The Oxbridge educated denizens of the Beeb would probably have caught an allusion to the sex acts in Satyricon but liverpulian working class slang went right over their head
Indeed, but “gross” is not quite so light. And I’d say calling something “transphobic” in 2026 is not at all light, particularly when you are pretty much completely wrong about that.
Lola is a masterpiece of a song precisely because the lyrics are so perfectly ambiguous. Everybody “knows” what they mean even though half the people interpret it in a way opposite to the other half, and a third half looks at it orthogonally.
As somebody who was listening in 1970, I always assumed Lola was a transvestite. The number of people who were famously transgender then probably could be counted on one hand, and the number of people who would get the reference even fewer. But transvestites were common knowledge, whether they were accepted or reviled.
I have always hated under my thumb. Generly I like the stones, but that song always makes me want to punch mic in his smug face.
Same here. I have been a massive stones fan, since I started listening to music (as long as I’ve been a Kinks fan). But that song always really bugged me, long before I could articulate it as clearly describing emotional abuse by a controlling arsehole. Even if it’s not describing a real relationship that happened, it’s glorifying and aspiring to be the controlling arsehole in that relationship, which isn’t much better.
Less so Stupid Girl though. It’s not a nice song, but there is nothing abusive about it, just a cathartic slagging off of another woman.