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This is the first in a series of essays about music by Daryl Hall and John Oates. Theirs is, of course, a well-known, and much-discussed catalog of albums and songs. The approach and voice I will use will be primarily personal but also sociologically inclined. I can’t promise to cover all of their music, or any particular part of it, even. I will cover a song or album if I have some personal history or relationship with it, or otherwise find it useful in making some broader point about H2O’s music.

What am I trying to accomplish here? After recently diving into episodes of the now-concluded(?) Out of Touch: A Hall and Oates Podcast, along with reading a thoughtful essay at Picking Up Rocks, I got to thinking about how an extended examination of H2O might resonate with others. I hope to expose some readers to the sophistication and complexity in H2O’s music, and to reassure existing fans that they’ve been right all along about Daryl Hall and John Oates: that there’s real depth in why this music continues to resonate with us culturally and personally.

I’m starting off with a post about their 1983 song “Adult Education”. When envisioning this project, it was the first song to come to mind.

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“Adult Education” is an unusual moment for Daryl Hall and John Oates. It was released as one of two newly recorded tracks on a long-playing collection of former hits, Rock & Soul Part 1 (1983). It is musically darker and tonally more serious than most of their other songs. It almost functions like an evil twin to its more congenial AM radio-friendly sibling, “Say It Isn’t So” (the other newly recorded track on the collection). But while it is an unusual song for the legendary pop duo, it is also arguably one of their densest songs in terms of its thematic complexity and its innovative sound design.

In terms of sound design, it certainly stands out amidst their catalog. “Adult Education” ventures into unusual aesthetic territory for the duo. Forget the music video for a moment, and close your eyes.

The opening sounds are the backup vocal tracks, chanting “adult”, pronounced in two different ways. Then the listener hears the most prominent musical motif in the song – a guest guitar riff by Nile Rodgers, played on a clean Fender Stratocaster. When the rest of the ingredients in the main groove are added in, we see that this riff leads and dominates the song, imposing an art-funk style [1].

The song is mid-tempo, upbeat, but in a minor key, which is unusual for the duo at this point in their career. Rhythmically, it comes off very mechanical, almost industrial (reflecting its institutional/prison-like setting). It lacks the rounded soul and blues rhythms and tonalities normally present in H2O songs, and it also lacks the affection, sweetness, or warmth that a Hall & Oates song usually showers listeners with. It is all about “long halls and grey walls”; it is cold as high school. The rhythms also evoke a “late night prowl” kind of vibe. On top of it all, the narrator (Hall) seems to take a somewhat paternal tone toward his subject matter, as if giving teenagers lectures about how to live their lives.

The song is musically darker than perhaps anything else they’ve done. The thunderous drum production (likely the work of producer Bob Clearmountain) gives depth to the mix, a sort of explosive core to the song. The chorused electric guitar strumming brings this rhythmic core into a somewhat more controlled, human-scaled, organic space than it would otherwise be in on its own. The bass is heavily sustained and used to build texture, as are the synthetic horn-like instrument sounds. There are only a few more ornamental elements – arpeggiated accents in the second verse, power chords, gate-reverbed drums, the cheerleader chanting, G.E. Smith’s rock guitar solo, and Hall’s soulfully sung -if defiant- narration.

The “cheerleading” sounds really help to establish a cinematic atmosphere here. It sounds almost like the song is being performed as part of a high school musical, on the high school’s playing field, right before a game, as if to warn the students about their terrible predicament in this mixed up “education” they’re receiving, where “adulthood” as an idea is rendered more chaotic and confusing, not less. The truncated “oh-oh” samples of chanting women perfectly punctuate the narrator’s key points in the second verse. The “oh yeah-oh yeah” response to Hall’s line “student body’s got a bad reputation” concurs with him, reinforcing Hall’s insistence that the students deserve a better education than this.

Perched at the peak of H2O’s fame, it sits atop their catalog as a pivot point. It looks forward, toward the funk-inflected Big Bam Boom album (1984), and away from the smooth, soulful pop arrangements of prior hits “One on One” and “I Can’t Go For That”. It eschews the driving piano tropes present in hits like “Kiss on My List” and “Private Eyes”.

But what is the song about?

I think the answer lies in the word “adult”. “Adulthood” is the central thematic concept in the song’s lyrics. The “adult/adult” backing vocal is also a rhythmic anchor for the song musically. And, whether intentional or not, the alternating pronunciations of “adult” (featured prominently at the opening of the song) create a strange semantic instability inside the song itself.

According to Merriam-Webster, the term “adult” is “borrowed from French & Latin; French adulte, going back to Middle French, borrowed from Latin adultus, from past participle of adolēscere, adulēscere “to become mature, grow up,” from ad- AD- + alēscere “to be nourished, grow up,” probably inchoative derivative of *alēre”, to grow,” stative derivative of alere “to nurse, feed, nourish”.

Why point out this difference? Is it meaningful? Is the word “adult” even semantically distinct based on its pronunciation? Etymologists are silent on this, pinning the different pronunciations solely on regional differences — with American English speakers preferring emphasis on syllable 2 (iambic), with the UK and Canada being the sites for an accent on syllable 1 (trochaic).

Based on how I’ve heard the variants used, here’s how I interpret them. The trochaic version sounds more formal to me than the iambic version. The iambic pronunciation seems to connote “forbidden” in a way that the trochaic version does not. The trochaic also lends itself well to the word’s use as an adjective – we don’t usually say “A-dult films”. We say “uh-DULT movies”. But we do say “act like an A-dult”. Then again, we now say “uh-DULTing” (a verb form of the word that didn’t exist in 1983).

Is this a binary opposition? And if so, does it tell us something? The logic might read as follows: the trochaic “adult” is a noun, and a model for us to emulate, a model of a mature, responsible human. The iambic “adult” is a more promiscuous signifier – at once a noun, an adjective, and perhaps also a verb – flirting with all the taboo aspects of adulthood. Adulthood is about responsibility (in terms of how you are supposed to learn it in high school), but it’s also inevitably a world of corruption, promiscuity, and debauchery.

This aligns well with the dualism expressed in the lyrical description of a high school where the real lessons are hard, ugly truths about adults who do not provide strong modeling for young people. And since the song is concerned centrally with what adolescents learn in the highly sexualized, competitive world of high school (while formally training them to be responsible adults), the dual connotations that may attach to different pronunciations lend support to the overall theme.

But there’s an additional layer to the word “adult” – its original Latin form is derived from the concept of adolescence (not the other way around, which one might intuitively expect). Adolescence is the central concept; “adult” is a modification, meaning “post-adolescence”.

It is in this sense that adulthood is positioned as something one must be ritually transformed into. This comes across as a kind of variant on the PSA: “believe it or not, there’s life after high school”, a proto-“it gets better” reassurance from the narrator of the song. High school is where that transition is ritually performed on you.

“Adult Education” confronts the confusing dualities – the madness – of high school, repeatedly contrasting institutional ideals of discipline and maturity with the chaotic emotional and sexual realities of teenage life. Hall and Oates interrogate high school, and find a bleak, competitive reproduction of the adult world within it. In response, they shrug, saying “deal with it” – a distinctly Gen X version of reassurance — less hopeful than “it gets better,” but in roughly the same spirit.

Eight years later, Nirvana issued a more apocalyptic evacuation order for the same American high school paradigm, in “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. Hall and Oates issue a warning and reassurance, rather than a call to abandon the project of adulthood. High school is here, it’s big and it’s bad, and there’s nothing you can do except cope and hopefully live through it. Compared to other iconic “high school” songs, the message that “high school sucks, adulthood sucks, deal with it” is a far cry from Nirvana’s “entertain us” fatalism, and from Pink Floyd’s “We Don’t Need No Education” refusal.

So what, in the end, made this recorded song unique? Was it Bob Clearmountain’s production work? Or the influence of Nile Rodgers (who contributed the song’s distinctive, agenda-setting guitar riff)? Or was it simply setting us up to look for more binary oppositions with these conspicuous pronunciation variations of “adult”?

I’m not sure, but I’m leaning toward a different theory altogether: that H2O were trying to build upon a somewhat darker thematic thread that weaves in and out of their first twelve LPs of material. This thread consists of elements of occult and American gothic aesthetics and subjects. I am working on another essay in which I explore this thread much more deeply.

“Adult Education” sits in the H2O catalog as a rare minor key song, paternalistic and didactic in tone, with little of the trappings of soul or R&B. It’s rock, not soul. And it provides a helpful PSA for early 80s middle schoolers, trying to make sense of the contradictory models of adulthood that they would see in institutionalized life every day.

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As a bookend for this reflection, I want to add that “Adult Education” is an interesting perch from which to observe broader changes afoot in music and popular culture in the early 1980s. It looks forward to the emerging future (funk, digital samplers, MTV) and away from the past (roots music, the Fender Rhodes, LP records). As I will discuss in a later chapter, this historical context brings additional layers of meaning to the themes of the song itself.

N’Oates

[1] Notably, this guitar riff is very similar to – and occupies a similar space in the music and sound mix to – another riff Rodgers created, for David Bowie’s “China Girl”, in the same year.