defend the indefensible: Hall and Oates

So, this thread was started in 2004... has the whole poptimism movement shifted the definition of 'indefensible' in the intervening 14 years?
I just can't see someone starting this thread in 2018.

But lots of people thought H&O were defensible in 2004, 1994, and 1984.

OP was very much out of sync with ILM tastes iirc

yes

the 21st century revival of hall and oates had already started by at least 2003 iirc because this was when i got into them and i didn't get into them because i was deep diving for 80s pop, i definitely encountered them in pop culture/hearing their songs incidentally in my life

IIRC the motion was famous and globally successful > dormant but not unloved > respected and sampled > loved unapologetically.

Both Daryl and John played it pretty well in their own ways. D. himself is now almost overexposed, and sometimes verges on cornball. But the body of work is unimpeachable.

On that pestilential Righteous Bros cover.

never cared much for the original

Impeccable pitch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeAkYS9WqrM&fbclid=IwAR3pPuYDmF-XOzQf5XJiRFLLKLdSxmWmmqB2MELDe0pirmBkLqPaJv6-C7M

link appears broken

works for me, unless you meant it is broken because it's missing the backing track. one of my go-to songs at karaoke

Let's try it again:

https://youtu.be/AeAkYS9WqrM

Nice.

I don't think I ever heard Method of Modern of Love on the radio. What a shame

"Adult Education" fuckin' rocks. There's nothing wrong with Hall & Oates, apart from John Oates' mustache.

― Alex in NYC (vassifer), Friday, January 2, 2004 2:04 AM (fifteen years ago)

I hope you were caught up in a wave of reckless abandon from early days of ILX and have since then recanted your opinion regarding Oates’ mustache.

don't trash the 'stache

In retrospect, Oates looks way better *WITH* the stache than without.

Lyrics to ‘Adult Education’ seem a bit crepey in retrospect - what exactly is going on in that song?

the high point of low school is getting out of there

Discussed with a pal more musically astute than I that "Kiss on Your List" is one of the most dramatic examples of the parallel major in pop music I have ever heard, at least since the Baroque pop of the '60s (a la " Happy Together").

such a beautiful song

Craig Jenkins interview:

Best album you ever made

There are parts of many of them that I think are the best parts, but I don’t think there is one best Hall & Oates album. Truthfully, the most impactful albums to me are my solo albums. They’re the ones that matter the most to me because I liked the people I worked with. My favorite albums I’ve ever done are Three Hearts in the Happy Ending Machine with Dave Stewart and the Sacred Songs album with Robert Fripp. I find no fault with either of those albums. With Hall & Oates, there are a lot of songs I would redo.

https://www.vulture.com/2021/08/hall-and-oates-daryl-hall-interview.html

nice. i love ghetto smile too.

I know Sacred Songs, that is a nice one. I always wished Fripp released an all-Hall Exposure as he originally planned, but he did do a great job of turning a drawback into an advantage with the new vocalists he recruited.

There's no Hall & Oates album that I like start-to-finish - in the past, Hall mentioned that Abandoned Luncheonette was his favorite but stipulated "with side two, if I could change anything, I’d just get rid of all that (production) crap and let the songs be the songs," and I'm pretty much in agreement. I do think they come off great in a well-curated compilation.

AL has my favorite Oates material.

Yeah, side one is pretty great. I'm partial to the Philly soul records they made with Atlantic - even the three leftovers included on the No Goodbyes compilation are gems.

I own the '09 box set, and it includes stuff like this:

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

Yeah, there's one of them! For a while that box set was the only place they ever issued that song on CD, at least in the U.S. "It's Uncanny" and "I Want to Know You for a Long Time" are the other two off of No Goodbyes.

This was hilarious:

"Robert bloody fucking Christgau gave Abandoned Luncheonette a C. (Ed. note: It was a B-.) One of the great albums of the ’70s. So there you go. What an asshole."

Christgau wasn't crazy about them - the best he gave them was a B+, and that was only on two compilations.

I like war babies all the way through. and I’ve meekly defended ooh! yeah on here before.

No can do.

This cracks me up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh5f-_I1df4

The concept of Hall & Oates being indefensible is indefensible itself.

Hall & Oates were a perfectly acceptable pop act when I was 11 or so. I liked one or two of their songs, and disliked others. This persistent idea that they were anything more than replacement-level chart pop (which, honestly, I have never encountered outside ILX) is baffling.

“Out of Touch” is surely one of my top 20 songs of the 80’s, if I ever made such a list.

Whom would they have replaced? xpost

Are they still the biggest-selling duo of all-time? I guess the '80s were a gold rush in selling records, but it's still surprising to me that they'd sell more records than, say, Simon & Garfunkel.

Hall was on one of the shortest episodes of Broken Record ever. Seems like he has a bunch of chips on his shoulder.

I interviewed him just before 9/11 and he was great fun. I remember asking him if he got stuck into all the 80s drugs and excess, and he said "Have you seen my hair and clothes from that era?". They've made some great records.

my favourite niche H&O fact is that they had upper east side rooms on the same landing as harper "to kill a mockingbird" lee

I interviewed Hall once and he was great. He got a kick out of me asking if they were going to perform "You Burn Me Up I'm a Cigarette" that night. He has a great voice. Other than that, I've never felt compelled to spend much time with them other than the time I've been made to spend with them because their songs were all over the radio for much of my adolescence.

The thing that surprises me the most is how kind of chintzy so many of their hits sound now, despite having big budgets and great players. They're one of the rare bands I wish really would re-record their catalog.

Huh. I thought the early '00s CD remasters sounded great: rich and full, especially on the synth jams. As for the original arrangements, their spareness was the attraction when younger bands discovered them a decade and a half ago, no?

Case in point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfgUqQg8UqM

yeah i think their records sound great! the 70s stuff is lush with old school studio time, and the 80s stuff is punchy as hell without losing a sense of texture and detail. and their voices are great together. I agree they don't have a "perfect album," but they do have a number of very good ones.

i'm curious which 80s pop acts folks would definitively rank *above* them in terms of overall output. okay, Madonna, MJ, and Prince wouldn't surprise me, but ... who else?

i feel like their best-selling duo status MIGHT depend a bit on 80s numbers being more reliable/available than 60s number. S&G and the Everlys moved a LOT of product. but H&O had a LOT of BIG hits - there's a reason they've never gone away from daytime feel-good radio.

They had so many hits that you only hear a handful of them on radio, according to Sean Ross.

https://radioinsight.com/blogs/187495/lost-hits-of-the-80s-year-by-year/

Like I said, I've never listened to them on purpose (for no particular reason), so I'm at a discussion disadvantage, but much of what I'm familiar with (and there are more songs of theirs I'm familiar with from the radio than some bands' entire catalogs) has long struck me as weirdly not slick. Like, not bad - they were hits, after all - but "Private Eyes," "I Can't Go For That," "One on One," stuff like that, felt strangely not just spare but even demo-like, practically lo-fi, compared to contemporaneous stuff by, say, Billy Joel. The production was more akin to a lot of crossover new wave music than '70s soul guys with big budgets and session dudes.

that's precisely what made them palatable to ILX in the early '00s

Yeah, I dunno about what made them palatable to ILX 20 years ago, not that I believe you. I'm just surprised that's what the songs sounded like *then*, in the early '80s. Have they ever talked about it in interviews, why it ended up that way? "Boys of Summer," for example, started life as a demo, and supposedly much of the demo ended up in the final version because Don didn't like any other versions better. Same with Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock and Roll" and Quiet Riot's "Cum On Feel the Noize." But the first two of those still sound pretty slick and full, finished and fleshed out. Did Hall & Oates go that spare, demo-like route on purpose, as an aesthetic?

Don't get me wrong, the absence of glop is definitely what's helped the songs weather the years! But was that a happy accident?

(Not that I *don't* believe you, sorry!)