What do Gen-Y'ers/millennials think of Hall and Oates?

I'm late Gen-X (born 1976) and H&O were huge in those early MTV years, but they sounded a lot different (more a relic of the '70s?) than the more "urban"/electronic things that were popular at the time. Not that there wasn't white and non-urban music around (Nashville country, aging prog-pop bands like Asia and Yes, pre-makeover Sheena Easton), but again, I think those were relics of the '70s and people my age were drawn more to Madonna and Thriller and Gary Numan's "Cars." That's the '80s that's really become part of the monoculture memory bank.

I can't tell how much of "chillwave" or nods to early '80s yacht rock is driven by people my age or older, or if there's a genuine fascination with blue-eyed soul and marina rock among today's millennial-ish hipsters. And am I overstating the role in this kind of music in the current climate and in youth culture?

So: Hall and Oates, and similar artists. This isn't a "classic or dud?" thread, more of a sociological question about young whippersnappers from a fuddy duddy.

they don't

I like hall and oates but I would imagine that 90% of people in my demographic could not tell you who they were

xp voila

j/k i love hall & oates (but i'm 30)

xp

thread inspired by hearing "say it isn't so" in a coffee bean this morning, and feeling old and self-conscious as i sang along.

talk amongst yourselves; gotta go.

actually I just remember I remember I was in a classroom in high school (it wasn't my class, it was kids a year younger, I had to get something) and the teacher mentioned hall and oates and was surprised that not a single student knew who they were. then he sang a little bit of 'maneater'. and I said 'I like hall and oates'.

but there you go, scientific study, almost, kinda

I was just telling a 62 year old music librarian how much I love Hall and Oates, but I am 32 and fall squarely in the demo of "raised on 80s radio."

I was born in 1980; am I Gen-Y? Hall & Oates are a fave; I even saw them live last year, and they kicked ass!

I am 25 and I love Hall and Oates but it would probably be better music if it had washes of synthesizers going "whaoooooooooo"

i feel like you could probably patch together a complete history of the critical rehabilitation of H&O over the past 10-12 years just from ILM's archives

ilm has always liked h&o tho

i am 38 and hall and oates make me want to die i hate them so much

iirc there's like an old defend the indefensible:h&o and it's just like 'I like them!' 'me too!' 'also I like them!'

i have Abandoned Luncheonette and i think it's a great record but haven't gotten around to going deeper. afaik none of my friends listen to them at all. (i'm 25)

yeah ilm has definitely been more pro-h&o for longer than most other places but still you can trace the narrative pretty clearly

defend the indefensible: Hall and Oates

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I like them, if only in an American Psycho / sterile yuppie kinda way. I mean, "Rich Girl" is a great song, no?
― roger adultery (roger adultery), Thursday, January 1, 2004 7:53 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The biggest selling double act of all time, and the 3rd biggest selling act of the 80s. Also, they were fucking great.
― Dom Passantino (Dom Passantino), Thursday, January 1, 2004 7:55 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there is nothing "indefensible" about hall and oates. "i can't go for that" is a funky ass song.
― fiddo centington (dubplatestyle), Thursday, January 1, 2004 7:55 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yep, my thoughts exactly. Theres alot of Hall and Oates love here and rightly so.
― jed (jed_e_3), Thursday, January 1, 2004 7:58 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

One of the first bands I was ever consciously into as opposed to knowing a song on the radio without knowing anything about the person who created it (like Numan's "Cars," which I enjoyed without having any thought about the guy who made it). When I first started listening to radio intensively in 1981/82 they were all over the top 40 AM station I tuned into and it was all grand, and "Maneater" the following year has something of the same minimal creep vibe of "Billie Jean" -- jauntier if you will, nowhere near as brilliantly focused and paranoid, but still it understates rather than overstates. Got the next couple of albums after that, including the pretty damn great first hits comp Rock and Soul Volume 1 (which wisely, I realize in retrospect, left off "Family Man") and saw them live in 1984 with my dad, who was also a fan. It was loud, a bit over the top, and great. Even liked Hall's "Dreamtime" solo single and somehow bought Ooh Yeah! in 1988 (and then ignored it). Whether or not I need to play them again I don't know but they beat the heck out of Phil Collins if we're going to use the opening question as a comparison point...
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Thursday, January 1, 2004 7:59 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"I Can't Go For That" is surely one of the best kamikaze DJ set drops of all time?
― Tim Finney (Tim Finney), Thursday, January 1, 2004 8:00 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'll be honest -- I was pretty ignorant of H&O growing up. I'm 32, but I didn't really start paying attention to pop music until I was 11, at which point the group's best days were behind them.

So I basically discovered H&O within the past decade. I think it probably started with digging the sample of "I Can't Go for That" on Since I Left You and then downloading/YouTubing other of their hits.

But I do think there's been a wider cultural resurgence, too -- e.g., the dance number in (500) Days of Summer set to "You Make My Dreams Come True." Or even this.

when i was 8 or 9, i was in a tap dancing class with two other girls. our teacher was this manic woman who was later institutionalized (my mom and i went to visit her in the hospital), but before she locked herself up, she taught us a tap routine to "maneater", which we performed to thunderous applause during our recital. we wore pink fringed flapper skirts that one of the girls' mom sewed especially for us. my 80 year old babysitter came to the recital and wore her dentures for the first time, which scared me. we were also both wearing makeup. even at the time, it felt totally surreal.

this was in the early/mid 80s.

Classic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2JSYnj2sfw

b. 1984, don't think i really started listening to them until late into college, by which point their critical rehabilitation seemed pretty well under way. also i went as oates for halloween one year.

I revived another H&O thread a few years to post this.

Weezer's "Say It Isn't So" vs Hall & Oates' "Say It Isn't So"

b. 1982 and until adulthood i didn't really know much of H&O besides campy "Maneater" and "Jingle Bell Rock" videos on Beavis & Butthead and a handful of their biggest hits, i suspect because i grew up on classic rock radio and didn't hear much '70s/'80s oriented top 40.

Gary Numan's "Cars," released in 1979, is "more of the 80s"; but Asia, whose debut album came out in 1982, is a "relic of the 70s."

¯\(°_o)/¯

Also MTV-era H&O did not sound like the 70s at all. Their big MTV album, "Big Bam Boom," was produced by Bob Clearmountain!

basically H&O's "Say It Isn't So" is a perfect song: it and the next album's clutch of singles filtered Arthur Baker, New Wave, early eighties robo-soul, and Todd Rundgre into the chewiest of amalgams.

also: Daryl Hall was and remains one hell of a singer. The dude's got perfect pitch.

also i went as oates for halloween one year.

Me too!

did you guys have a Hall with you or was it just a lazy "i have a guitar and a fake mustache" thing?

I think this has been posted:

http://sphotos.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc3/11847_203429015324_503020324_4473719_648689_n.jpg

(Real mustache, btw.)

nice!

I love her sports coat.

You kids will never understand. You can't imagine how exciting it was to be there for the world premier of the Maneater video!

You only came out at night.

Yeah, that was a good Salvation Army find.

I modeled my look on the "Adult Education" video:
http://thekey.xpn.org/files/2011/10/Screen-shot-2011-10-31-at-1.57.25-PM-620x347.png

The girl was wild! Woo-oooo!

the "Adult Education" video is more fun than the last two Indiana Jones farragos.

Directed by Tim Pope! (Soft Cell, the Cure from "Let's Go to Bed" through Wish, etc.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s22ufU-67iM

i can't think of a single year from the time i became conscious of pop music til now that i wouldnt have called hall and oates a favorite act, even during the height of my "anything that isnt hardcore punk/hardcore rap is bullshit" tomfoolery.

fun familial fact: my sister was named in part because of both parents shared love for "sara smile, one of the few bands where my prog-ass dad and my "music was perfected by african-americans in the 70s" mom had any kind of overlap. (then again, i always imagined there was a little of fleetwood mac's "sara" in there.)

also i am wholly gen x so i shouldnt be answering this.

I have been distressed to discover over the past year or so that that 500 Days of Summer film has turned "You Make My Dreams Come True" into some kind of indie-kid archival classic. I remember playing it at a party and no less than three people came up to me and said "I love that film" as if I obviously knew what they meant, and I was like "???" and then they said the name and I was like "..." and then they described the scene and I was like "o_O".

also i am wholly gen x so i shouldnt be answering this.

"Wholly"? You were born in '78. Tail end.

Happy belated, btw.

haha okay: "my aesthetic taste was wholly defined by growing up with gen x"

xxpost -- Yeesh. Frightening thought.

i think theyre kinda played out

Which means it's time for the revival.

GTA Vice City got me into Hall & Oates when I was about 13...you can run and tell DAT, homeboy
low72 2 weeks ago 9

hate 'em with intense visceral passion, but I'm Gen X all the way.

I remember playing it at a party and no less than three people came up to me

Incidentally, I'm never quite sure what ILMers mean when they say they played music at a party. Is this a house party where you commandeered the stereo, or a bar/club where you were DJing?

I kept seeing the name H&O come up this past couple of years in Ariel Pink interviews and so on. Got their boxed set out of the library and slowly became a convert.

The principle road to domestos moment came with "Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid". For me this is like an interface between the INXS/Tears for Fears/Simple Minds world and art rock (the structure, slow build and sustained coda). Have listened to it hundreds of times now and it still does the trick.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIokCqMIJ_8

domestos?

It's a Peter Kay thing - sorry.

http://www.elizabethantiques.com/images/SPB1928PoliceBox.jpg

Born in 84, kind of have always been aware of their big hits from my early childhood and endless subsequent replays on "lite rock" type radio, but started realizing in the last few years how truly amazing they were - mostly.

I have a couple other friends my age who share my enthusiasm. 10% recognition among 20somethings seems low.

I distinctly remember "I can't go for that" being played at a hipster party around 2006, and seemed to hear them more and more in 'hip" settings after that: Hot Chip put them on the Bugged Out house party mix, Chromeo collaborations, etc.

I think in general Gen-Y and younger kids, music nerds and otherwise, are much more receptive to things like H&O and similar 80s radio fodder than the cool kids from a generation back who rejected their slickness for post-punk, hardcore, less commercial sounds

I think ground zero for the hipster take-up of "I Can't Go For That" was The Avalanches' mash-up of it with Daft Punk's "Oh Yeah" in circa 2000.

Obv there's like De La Soul sampling it before then, but it feels like there's a direct line from Gimix as proto mash-up culture and the beginnings of 80s revivalism through to its current ubiquity.

My interest in them predates this revival. When the local easy listening station switched to "eighties rock" in the late nineties, I heard the other singles that got buried under the Maneater-Private Eyes-I Can't Go For That avalanche: stuff like "One on One," "Say It Isn't So," "Wait For Me." Then a friend stuck the weird-awesome "Your Imagination" on a mix CD in the early 2000s and I was set.

Marcello either wrote a full appraisal of or inserted a couple of complimentary asides onBig Bam Boom, which to my ears hasn't dated one inch and does all kinds of spooky things with Arthur Baker electrobeat and dub.

stuff like "One on One," "Say It Isn't So," "Wait For Me."

Three of the greatest songs in pop music history, for my money.

My single favorite Hall and Oates song is now Out Of Touch, which I hated hated hated when I was a kid because of that all that uh, Arthur Baker electrobeat and dub stuff, I guess.

But now, holy mackerel people. That is one of the catchiest songs I have ever heard.

I'm sure I've posted this elsewhere, but I was born in '75 and Hall & Oates were my mom's favorite band during the 80s. Remember gettting her a Big Bam Boom sweatshirt for a birthday at one point.

I have a fondness for them, although I don't go out of my way to listen to them. Prefer Steely Dan and Boz Scaggs (another of my mom's favorites).

The four BBB singles are mad good.

I think H&O are a great gateway group for young hipsters emerging from the shell of Gen-Xer lies about the innate superiority of indie to facile pop (don't forget that for many of us Gen-Yers those Gen-Xers were our gatekeepers and elders when our tastes were forming): songs resonant enough to tap into early childhood sound memories but not played to death and not totally ubiquitous in larger popular culture; production that's clean and professional but still quirky and surprising; enough goofy outfits, mustaches, and naivete to allow young hipsters to pretend to be winking ironically while delving into their catalog...

I also don't think you can point to any one event or time as the time when the H&O revival began. They're one of those groups whose current popularity, I think, owes a lot to the early days of filesharing, when people of a certain age began experiencing the "oh yeah, THAT freaking song!" with '70s/'80s hits then being shared online for the first time. Those days did a lot to break me from my shackles of indie-good-major-bad thinking; I mean, imagine hearing a song as amazing as "Out of Touch" or "Family Man" for the first time (or, at least registering it for the first time as "a Hall & Oates song to aesthetically evaluate") and thinking, "damn, THIS is what the elders wanted to keep me from hearing?" That's what we call liberation, right?

how can we incorporate occupy wall street into that narrative

I should have added "Family Man" to my list a couple hours ago of singles I didn't hear at the time but blew my mind years later.

how can we incorporate occupy wall street into that narrative

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAmgHGtOeJ0

man i still wish i had that latin rascal's radio session where they do this live 12-minute freestyle dub of "out of time."

from my favorite millennial (born 1996):

"I only know two songs by H&O, Maneater and Out of Touch. Maneater is a great song, Out of Touch is OK I guess BUT WHY ARE YOU ASKING ME THIS DAD"

"Oh BTW I learned it from you"

ok, how many millennials are aware of the "I LEARNED IT BY WATCHING YOU, DAD" commercial?

rhetorical question/joke/etc

It is just funny and interesting how the perception does change from generation to generation.

I grew up on soul and black radio and Hall and Oates are part of the canon!

I imagine comfort with dance and r & b / hip-hop might lead young people to listen to Hall & Oates.

they sound pretty at home with philly soul and smooth r&b. (the quiet-storm station around here, 94.7 the wave, plays them a fair amount.)

but they also sound at home next to phil collins and christopher cross. context is everything.

yknow whos p cool rn is sting

I'm happy whenever anyone is passionate about any kind of music, and I usually hate the kind of posts that suggests that other people are inherently wrong to instinctively enjoy something, i.e. exactly what I did on this thread -- I'm certainly very confused by the H&O renaissance but people genuinely seem to like them so all the more for music in general

I think my allergy stems from the fact that my main exposure to them as a kid was their music videos; watching MTV and making it all the way through one of their clips in hopes that the next one would be something interesting, and just really having to take in the full extent of their onscreen personas, until they became inseparable from the music. These guys are hardly without talent and I understand that you need planet-sized confidence to pull this sort of thing off. And yes, some of their songs are extremely well executed, so why deny yourself the pleasure of participating?

I just can't get over what a complete fucking tool Daryl Hall is, and I can't get over the experience of them being a mainstream phenomena the first time around; but everyone gains agency & voluntary choice in the nostalgic period so it is only my loss & yes when they play "I can't go for that" I hardly walk off the dance floor I'm fine with it

Clarke B. expressed what I was thinking far more eloquently than I could.

Interesting point too about H&O's sustained popularity on old school/R&B radio. I think Sade is a good comparison in terms of being seen as unbearably cheezy (or maybe just too ADULT?) to indie/alt audiences but never really going away with the R&B/hip hop crowd, then being embraced by 2000s hipsters who suddenly have access to all music ever recorded and realize, not everything my mom listened to was so bad!

I started listening to 'I can't go for that' about a week ago after listening to that new Chairlift album which made me hanker for some H&O. Anyway since then I swear I've heard that song at least once a day in various stores and whatnot. Was it always this ubiquitous and I never noticed?

Such was their popularity with black audiences that "I Can't Go For That" hit #1 on the R&B chart.

why is hall a tool?

I suppose comments like these from Milton's link help:

. The fact that Daryl Hall has one of the greatest voices around, that he's one of the smoothest, most technically perfect singers ever, is glossed over by the fact that he's also a mainstream pop star. "It's weird," Hall says, without a trace of irony. "I'm just about the best singer I know, and it's time for everybody to say that. I have total facility with my voice. And for some weird reason, critics don't talk about it. Americans think that if you're popular there must be something wrong with you. To me, the best music now is music that everyone's listening to. Obscurity is just obscurity. There's no romance in obscurity." Hall pauses to spear some more pasta. This subject clearly frustrates him; Oates shrugs it off.

“I think we’re the Eighties Beatles,” Hall continues. “If we had been born twenty years earlier, maybe the world would have seen that. There’s something about our personalities that is very Lennon-and-McCartneyesque. And there is something about the body of work that we both have that’s similar.” Hall pauses again. “I know people will have trouble accepting that,” he says finally. “But I don’t have any trouble accepting it.”

Hall pauses to spear some more pasta truffle fries

hate the voices, the music is bland... does anything interesting ever happen in a H&O song?

keep in mind that I LOVE Philly soul and the Pop narrative and everything, just can't feel these guys.

saw a "I'd rather be at a Hall & Oates concert" bumper sticker in the Trader Joe's parking lot today.

Did a little voice inside your head say "don't look back, you can never look back"?

^^ A+

re: You Make My Dreams, it also appears on one of "The Wedding Singer" soundtracks which was 11 years before "500 Days Of Summer" and was probably the first serious "80's nostalgia" marketing that I can recall ("serious 80's nostalgia" meaning that it was the first time that it was marketed as "it's ok to enjoy the 80's again" as opposed to the anti-80's negativity that seemed prominent throughout the first 8 years of the 90's... the only real "80's nostalgia" prior to that were like the commercials for free CD's that would come with Details magazine where idiots wore headphones and reacted to the free CD in the middle of a Tower Records setting and said that it was all their favorite songs all in a row or whatever)

I bought my first eighties comp (the excellent Living in Oblivion series) in '93.

I was in high school from 77-81, so these guys were everywhere on the radio for me right when I was most irritable and hated everything, so naturally I hated them. When I hear them now, I think "eh, that's not too bad after all."

My favorite "Hall is a tool" moment may be when he chastised Babyface for acknowledging his race at a tribute:

“Soul music is not about race,” Hall said, after he and partner John Oates were presented with Icon Awards during performing rights group BMI’s annual Pop Music Awards ceremony. “There ain’t no ‘blue-eyed soul’ … Keep that in mind, OK?” Minutes earlier, Edmonds had performed the duo’s tune “Sara Smile” after jokingly recounting his youthful assumption that “blue-eyed soul” — an approbatory term used to describe soulful white singers — meant “black guys with blue eyes.”

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2008/05/21/uk-bmi-idUKN2134548620080521

Hall, nicknamed the Führer by his band, says all this with some animation. He refers to his lyrics as examples: "I can't go for being twice as nice/I can't go for just repeating the same old lines." He refers to the fact that he went into the studio to record Big Bam Boom with nothing planned. He was, he says, "daring myself. Because, if I have a religion, it's the religion of the self. I don't follow anybody. And that scares people, but I like the idea of scaring people. I wish I scared people more. I don't know if I scared anyone on this new album, but I'm better at scaring people in my personal life. I change quickly. I go from nice to not nice. I'm like a snake. Don't back me into a corner or I'll bite hard. Deadly hard."

Hall won't explain further. He offers no examples, just laughs, looks at the tape recorder and shakes his head no. This is not surprising. "I mean," Hall explains, "how would that look in print?" He's clever. He mixes philosophical allusions with practical sense, "meaningful" lyrics with pop songs. He wants to be heard.

But Hall does have belief, at least in himself. Two of his uncles were ministers, and his great-grandfather was a warlock. ("He cured cattle and all.") "I grew up around that seein'-the-light kind of thing;" he says. "And now I'm a secular version of it. In my uncles' time, you were a minister. Two generations before that you were a warlock. Now you're me. It's just a current. I believe in the ability to change reality through will, and that is the definition of magic. I feel I have done that."

It's a pretty apt karmic punishment that, even if fans don't care if Oates actually sings any of the songs, he can't get anywhere near the same guarantee if Oates isn't there.

obv referring to pop fans, not hardcore discography followers here.

I was born in '81 but I always thought of H&O and 80's soft rock as pretty worthless. A few years ago, maybe 5 or so, they started turning up being played in all the hipster spots, right around the time everyone was wearing ironic mustaches. There was even a painting someone made of Oates dressed like Jesus holding a PBR can. It all really turned me off during a time when given the social/cultural climate, I should have been (re)discovering them.

I've never conciously listened to H&O but I'm aware who they are, most people in my generation wouldn't I reckon.

Maneater still gets AM radio airplay so everybody knows that one. Also when I was around 10 I remember Disney Channel played a fuckton a music video of 'Private Eyes' with clips of Donald Duck cartoons. Simply Red's Sunshine was a big hit in here and I still hear it on the radio every now and then so that's another one even if it's just a sample. Also my memory fails me but I think some band from the mid-90s covered 'rich girl' for some movie or something because I rememeber hearing a version of it played a lot during those years.

I still like Hall and Oates a lot, but I tend to gravitate mostly towards their 80s hits these days. especially "I Can't Go for That", "Private Eyes", "Out of Touch", and "Maneater".

did hall have a coke phase? xps

everyone was wearing ironic mustaches

and posting ironically?

AM radio still plays music??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLFrzkTHP18

AM radio still plays music??

― buzza, Sunday, February 26, 2012 2:36 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah but it's usually salsa

In my uncles' time, you were a minister. Two generations before that you were a warlock. Now you're me.

Hilarious - I can picture the young Dylan saying something like this.