![]() ![]() While “Maneater” sat at #1, Phil Collins’ cover of “You Can’t Hurry Love” was climbing the charts. The “Maneater” intro is close enough to the intro of the Supremes’ 1966 #1 “ You Can’t Hurry Love” that it would’ve been legally actionable if they’d done it today. Daryl Hall has said that the demo version of “Maneater” was basically a reggae song and that he switched the groove up to make it more of a Motown thing. John Oates came up with the skeleton of the song, recording a demo for it with previous Number Ones artist Edgar Winter. There’s no big origin story behind “Maneater.” Instead, it’s just Hall & Oates doing their thing, continually pushing and refining one more track for mass consumption. H2O spawned three top-10 singles, and with “Maneater,” the album’s opening track and first single, Hall & Oates landed the biggest hit of their career. H2O came out in October of 1982, and while it never got higher than #3 on the Billboard album chart, it stayed on that chart for a year and a half, selling millions and becoming one of the biggest albums of 1983, a year that was not exactly hurting for big albums. It was one more savvy move in a long list of them. When Hall and Oates were making their eleventh album H2O, they invited MTV’s cameras into the studio with them. In the early MTV years where Black artists almost never got airplay, Hall & Oates were perennial standbys - White guys who knew how to move in their videos, making variations on Black music. Even the members of their backing band stood out for instance, their guitarist, the future TV star GE Smith, looked like a particularly smug ice sculpture. The backing-vocal interjections of their songs gave people a whole lot of chances to turn to the camera for eye-grabbing little close-ups. In their clips, they were smooth and gawky in equal measure. Hall & Oates didn’t really like making music videos, but music videos liked them. For a while, they were an absurd hit machine, so efficient that they cranked out a new album almost every year and never quite left the pop charts. They found ways to combine twitchy synthetic new wave with the slick white-boy soul that first made them famous, and they managed that trick without quite betraying either side of their sound. After 10 years and 10 albums, they’d moved through multiple phases and settled on a sound - a kind of creamy futurist doo-wop - that suited both them and their moment. In the early ’80s, Daryl Hall and John Oates really had things figured out. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. ![]()
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