Babs and Babs. Daryl Hall. 1980. RCA.

 Of all the worlds of artificiality and simulacra that commercial radio has asked us to inhabit, it’s the ones created by Hall and Oates that are probably least offensive of all. The dominant odor there is an admixture of bar soap, open bottles of Zima, and worn female designer gym socks. Questions of health and hygiene arise because, of Hall’s many talents, the strength to cultivate an audience is the one most obviously always at work. What makes a Daryl Hall record so enjoyable—especially those he made with John Oates—is the lack of concentration required of the listener for them to work. Which does not make them disposable. Like the songs of Barry Gibb and Earth, Wind and Fire, the best Hall and Oates work connects with you at a level where matters of grave importance happily do not intrude, and it becomes some of your favorite songs; if asked to choose which one we love most, it’s virtually impossible to answer. Sara Smile? I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)? There’s a lot of ambition on the Hall solo record Babs and Babs, but not enough to dampen your expectations. The song is about a failing relationship, and about having lost the will to communicate. Hall is backed beautifully by his and Oates’ touring band, along with Robert Fripp, who gives the song an added dimension, an encroaching sinister mood; the feeling that comes when you lose someone you love and realize you’re also losing a part of yourself that may cost you more than you can afford to part with. Commercially, the song failed to find an audience, but it isn’t typical of Hall’s most successfully selling music; its issues are far less resolved than Kiss On My List, released that same year. It was 1980, and it was our serious misfortune that our passage into Orwellian real time coincided with a manic, nationwide teenage embrace of radio and television advertisements by way of MTV. Thus began a long tradition of consumerism complicated by contradictions around cultural signifiers like freedom, jingoism, gender hegemony, all of which bled into both local and national politics. Having witnessed this unsettling trajectory of events from boyhood onwards I take no small pleasure in tracing its origin to the social imperative for high school conformity, beginning with deodorized armpits and genitals.


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