Thank You For Inventing Oatmeal

by Alexandra Molotkow

Around a decade ago — or whenever, I don’t want to argue about this — there was a sort of mass epiphany where people realized they could just like the music they liked. People celebrated bands once dismissed for being too popular — popularity had realigned with merit, because music could now succeed or fail on its own merits, rather than its status in some critical monoculture. And Hall and Oates were poster boys for “poptimism,” or whatever you want to call it. No band so populist had been so hated for it.

The ideal of “liking everything,” without apology or explanation, seems totally naive in hindsight. Associations matter, obviously; it’s just that everyone makes their own. What you like says more about you than it ever did, because the world is a lot bigger, and thus a lot more clique-ish; and since there are no givens, identifying yourself requires more thought and care. Taste divides more finely than ever, I think, along moral and political lines: it means a lot to say you hate Jonathan Franzen but love Chris Kraus, that you hate John Lennon but love Kanye West.

I love Hall and Oates. Saying that feels redundant: I also love ice cream sandwiches, and tall plants. But I feel a little bit guilty about loving Hall and Oates. Not because they’re too popular — I feel more bashful saying I don’t like things that are popular — but because I associate them with something I find distasteful. “I understand what it’s like to be a black musician in a white world,” said Daryl Hall, in a deeply cringe-y interview with Pitchfork from 2007. He thought he’d been written off unfairly for being so blonde and blue-eyed. “It’s weird,” he told Lynn Hirschberg, writing for Rolling Stone in the mid-’80s. “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.” Daryl Hall is Arrogant White Maleness.

I won’t keep cataloging his offenses (if you want to actively hate him, you can read this interview with his son Darren, who was conceived during a one-night stand; but he’s nowhere near as bad as like, Eric Clapton). The fact is I’ve loved artists who’ve behaved much worse, and behavior is sort irrelevant anyway. The issue is attitude, which is the reason people once railed against American Apparel while shopping at H&M.; Hall and Oates are just off, it’s a philosophical thing.

“Americans think that if you’re popular there must be something wrong with you,” Hall told Hirschberg. “To me, the best music now is music that everyone’s listening to. Obscurity is just obscurity. There’s no romance in obscurity.” In the Pitchfork interview, he reiterated: “Every artist, no matter how you want to label him or her, has to be a pop artist. I don’t care if you’re Bob Dylan, Kurt Cobain… you gotta be popular, or else nobody knows who you are.” There’s something sort of Nietzschean in this: obscurantists are losers, who console themselves by declaring it Backwards Day. I mean I’ve heard this line elsewhere and basically agreed, but it makes a difference when the speaker resembles the Übermensch.

The crumbling of monoculture has had two contradictory effects, both of which I’m into: it tightens communities, while making it very easy to identify with many at once, or to identify with none because right now you are just really feeling this song. None of us is just one person; each of us is many people, depending on the circumstance. So it’s OK to love what you hate, and to hate what you love, and that ambivalence, or that tension between dueling identities, is interesting. Hall and Oates are so status quo it’s grotesque, which has made loving them feel, for various reasons, taboo; it’s also ridiculous, which makes them seem benign.

The truth in Hall’s statements — and one of the best general rebuttals to obscurity as a pose — is that, whatever you’re doing, you should take care of your audience. Hall’s dick factor is mitigated by the fact that he’s here to make you happy. (This also goes for Adam Levine.) The reason I struggle sometimes with sex-on-a-mountaintop pop is that I can’t find the people inside of it. Katy Perry is a Megazord to me. So much of the joy of being an audience member is watching real people do magic things, which means there needs to be some suggestion of vulnerability. And Hall and Oates are extraordinarily vulnerable. NOT because they’re arrogant white dudes, but because they’re so silly.

Also, I just can’t imagine a human body not responding to “You Make My Dreams Come True,” and I would find it very difficult to hate something that makes me feel that good. Taste matters; there’s no making sense of what you love without accounting for values and identity, both yours and those of the people you care about. But what you love you love anyway.

Thank you @DVSblast for your immortal joke.