Todd in the Shadows - RAMBLE ON: "Rich Girl" by Hall & Oates
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There is not a single drop of gay subtext in Kokuho, some Japanese movie I watched last year because it got a minor Oscar nomination. Now, for this movie the absence of any homoerotic tension is quite shocking, because it’s about two friends from childhood who grow up to be fierce rivals to be kabuki theater’s best guy-who-wears-a-dress-and-pretends-to-be-a-woman. When they wear their women’s costumes and put on their falsettos and pretend to be young girls, there is not a single implication that either of them is less manly or straight for doing so. Maybe that’s just a cultural difference in Japan, maybe onnagatas have no unmanly stigma attached to them (doesn’t seem likely to me, but how would I know). But even if that’s true, that doesn’t explain the overwhelmingly hetero energy that the two main characters have when playing off each other. Their relationship is very intense, sure, but I never once got sense there was anything romantic in it. They don’t smolder when they look at each other. They don’t want to fuck. You’d think that if the filmmakers were merely apathetic or ignorant of any subtext, gay overtones would still creep in there unintentionally. (I’m playing Phoenix Wright for the first time and I’m guessing I’m not the first person to notice that the sparks between Wright and Edgeworth are off the charts, I don’t think on purpose.) No, the filmmakers must be intentionally avoiding it. And you know, I should be able to respect that; writers should be allowed to write about a relationship between two straight guys without people making juvenile gay jokes and/or hornily shipping them with each other. Right? I guess? Yeah, I don’t know. At the end of it, I wasn’t really clear why I should be interested in these characters or their relationship; Without any implied tension it just felt like there was something missing in the movie, just a fatal lack of intensity that rendered it pointless.
I bring this up because one little bit of pop trivia that fascinates me is that “Rich Girl,” the 1977 standard by Hall & Oates, was originally written as “Rich Guy.” You don’t need me to tell you this: That’s an entirely different song. Eventually Hall decided that it just didn’t sound right and it became “Rich Girl.” Now that’s something worth looking into.
One thing I’ve learned in my years of pop culture study is that Hall and Oates hate each other. By the mid-‘80s, they were barely on speaking terms, and quite possibly were never on the same page. (Hence their insistence on being referred to as “Daryl Hall & John Oates,” a thoroughly doomed attempt to disassociate from each other. Sorry, “Hall & Oates” you two remain for all of your days.) The problem, it seems, is that Daryl Hall is an aggressive, loud personality and Oates is much quieter; Hall sees Oates as a talentless load he’s been forced to carry for decades, and Oates sees Hall as a giant bully and spotlight hog who refuses to share credit. (In 2021 Hall called “She’s Gone” the best Hall and Oates single because it’s the only one that both he and Oates wrote; “all the other songs, I wrote,” he said, and I know off the top of my head that’s not true; Maneater, for example, was Oates’s song.)
The Hall vs. Oates feud just feels wrong; it’s okay if Van Halen is a bunch of puffed-up rock star assholes who hate each other, but the guys who wrote “Sara Smile” and “Kiss on My List”? Not all their songs are necessarily positive but they’re all smooth and romantic, stuff that puts you in a good mood to hear. This makes “Rich Girl,” their first number one, a real anomaly in their catalog; in the Hall & Oates canon, it’s the only song there that’s genuinely just mean, their one tune where you can see Daryl Hall’s inner asshole really come out. The goofy ‘80s pop doofs who made “You Make My Dreams Come True”, they went to #1 with a a nasty little poison pill of a song (in and out in barely over two minutes) where they mockingly, even gleefully sing “It’s a bitch, girl”? No way.
For the record, the original “Rich Guy” was inspired by an actual rich guy. Hall’s girlfriend Sara Allen was still close with an ex, and the details aren’t clear but Hall says he saw the dude pulling some bullshit and realizing that no matter what fuckery this guy committed in his lifetime, he’d always have daddy to pull his ass out of the fire. This is an entirely reasonable thing to write a song about, almost punk rock in its attack on class privilege. In every video I’ve ever seen from Hall & Oates in this era, they read working-class (extra credit to John Oates’s goofy mustache on this point) and it’s fun to imagine a world where they got more rock and wrote more confrontational music. Obviously that’s not who they were; they were two r&b loving white boys who were trying their best to honor Philly soul. That doesn’t mean all their songs had to be romantic; one of the greatest Philly soul songs is “Back Stabbers” and that song is angry as hell. The origin of “Rich Boy” has a strong subtext of sexual jealousy; Mr. Rich Kid there was a guy that literally used to fuck Hall’s girlfriend. That could have easily worked as a song, and yet, that’s not the direction it went.
My guess is that at some point Daryl realized he was writing a love song. If you didn’t know English, you would hear the finished “Rich Girl,” with its soaring soulful vocals and lush strings, and assume it had the same tone as “Sara Smile” or “She’s Gone.” Hall must have sensed that the song was not simply about class resentments; not with this arrangement, not with this melody, not with the way Daryl Hall sings. No, this song wasn’t just aimed at a rich douchebag; this is a song about detesting someone that you also desperately want to fuck. Thus, “Rich Girl”; it had to be. And to be clear, the problem with “Rich Guy” wasn’t that it would come off as gay; the problem is that it wouldn’t. It would just be a song about some asshole, and leaving it as a song about asexual class resentments would have rendered it inert. (By the same token, imagine “Common People” if it were about a guy. Immediately half as good!)
You could argue that this change makes the song misogynistic, and I would never dare to suggest that those elements aren’t there; in fact I would argue that it’s what makes the song, it’s what gives it its charge. (I’ll say again, you’re allowed to be mad at women sometimes. Women ain’t perfect!) The fact that the girl is rich lets Hall get away with being really, really nasty, and boy, he just lays into her. She doesn’t know right from wrong, she’ll never be strong, she’s too selfish to ever love someone. When Hall sings about how easy for her to hurt others when she doesn’t feel pain, that isn’t just a detached observation; he’s been hurt by her personally, and it’s impossible to imagine that it’s not something romantic or sexual. “Don’t you knowwww, don’t you know that it’s wrong to take what is given you,” you don’t sing something that hatefully condescending without having a real personal reason behind it. The song’s opulent orchestration feels sarcastic (in the video linked above, Hall grins his way through it while wearing an ironic fancy fur coat and scarf that makes the song even meaner than it already was.) I might have talked myself over into believing that this is Hall & Oates’s best song over the course of this essay. The song dehumanizes the rich girl by saying she dehumanizes others; “it’s so easy to hurt others when you can’t feel pain.” Can’t feel pain! What a burn. The rich girl in the song gets away with everything, but “Rich Girl” gets away with a lot too. It’s complicated. It’s a bitch, girl.
There is not a single drop of gay subtext in Kokuho, some Japanese movie I watched last year because it got a minor Oscar nomination. Now, for this movie the absence of any homoerotic tension is quite shocking, because it’s about two friends from childhood who grow up to be fierce rivals to be kabuki theater’s best guy-who-wears-a-dress-and-pretends-to-be-a-woman. When they wear their women’s costumes and put on their falsettos and pretend to be young girls, there is not a single implication that either of them is less manly or straight for doing so. Maybe that’s just a cultural difference in Japan, maybe onnagatas have no unmanly stigma attached to them (doesn’t seem likely to me, but how would I know). But even if that’s true, that doesn’t explain the overwhelmingly hetero energy that the two main characters have when playing off each other. Their relationship is very intense, sure, but I never once got sense there was anything romantic in it. They don’t smolder when they look at each other. They don’t want to fuck. You’d think that if the filmmakers were merely apathetic or ignorant of any subtext, gay overtones would still creep in there unintentionally. (I’m playing Phoenix Wright for the first time and I’m guessing I’m not the first person to notice that the sparks between Wright and Edgeworth are off the charts, I don’t think on purpose.) No, the filmmakers must be intentionally avoiding it. And you know, I should be able to respect that; writers should be allowed to write about a relationship between two straight guys without people making juvenile gay jokes and/or hornily shipping them with each other. Right? I guess? Yeah, I don’t know. At the end of it, I wasn’t really clear why I should be interested in these characters or their relationship; Without any implied tension it just felt like there was something missing in the movie, just a fatal lack of intensity that rendered it pointless.
I bring this up because one little bit of pop trivia that fascinates me is that “Rich Girl,” the 1977 standard by Hall & Oates, was originally written as “Rich Guy.” You don’t need me to tell you this: That’s an entirely different song. Eventually Hall decided that it just didn’t sound right and it became “Rich Girl.” Now that’s something worth looking into.
One thing I’ve learned in my years of pop culture study is that Hall and Oates hate each other. By the mid-‘80s, they were barely on speaking terms, and quite possibly were never on the same page. (Hence their insistence on being referred to as “Daryl Hall & John Oates,” a thoroughly doomed attempt to disassociate from each other. Sorry, “Hall & Oates” you two remain for all of your days.) The problem, it seems, is that Daryl Hall is an aggressive, loud personality and Oates is much quieter; Hall sees Oates as a talentless load he’s been forced to carry for decades, and Oates sees Hall as a giant bully and spotlight hog who refuses to share credit. (In 2021 Hall called “She’s Gone” the best Hall and Oates single because it’s the only one that both he and Oates wrote; “all the other songs, I wrote,” he said, and I know off the top of my head that’s not true; Maneater, for example, was Oates’s song.)
The Hall vs. Oates feud just feels wrong; it’s okay if Van Halen is a bunch of puffed-up rock star assholes who hate each other, but the guys who wrote “Sara Smile” and “Kiss on My List”? Not all their songs are necessarily positive but they’re all smooth and romantic, stuff that puts you in a good mood to hear. This makes “Rich Girl,” their first number one, a real anomaly in their catalog; in the Hall & Oates canon, it’s the only song there that’s genuinely just mean, their one tune where you can see Daryl Hall’s inner asshole really come out. The goofy ‘80s pop doofs who made “You Make My Dreams Come True”, they went to #1 with a a nasty little poison pill of a song (in and out in barely over two minutes) where they mockingly, even gleefully sing “It’s a bitch, girl”? No way.
For the record, the original “Rich Guy” was inspired by an actual rich guy. Hall’s girlfriend Sara Allen was still close with an ex, and the details aren’t clear but Hall says he saw the dude pulling some bullshit and realizing that no matter what fuckery this guy committed in his lifetime, he’d always have daddy to pull his ass out of the fire. This is an entirely reasonable thing to write a song about, almost punk rock in its attack on class privilege. In every video I’ve ever seen from Hall & Oates in this era, they read working-class (extra credit to John Oates’s goofy mustache on this point) and it’s fun to imagine a world where they got more rock and wrote more confrontational music. Obviously that’s not who they were; they were two r&b loving white boys who were trying their best to honor Philly soul. That doesn’t mean all their songs had to be romantic; one of the greatest Philly soul songs is “Back Stabbers” and that song is angry as hell. The origin of “Rich Boy” has a strong subtext of sexual jealousy; Mr. Rich Kid there was a guy that literally used to fuck Hall’s girlfriend. That could have easily worked as a song, and yet, that’s not the direction it went.
My guess is that at some point Daryl realized he was writing a love song. If you didn’t know English, you would hear the finished “Rich Girl,” with its soaring soulful vocals and lush strings, and assume it had the same tone as “Sara Smile” or “She’s Gone.” Hall must have sensed that the song was not simply about class resentments; not with this arrangement, not with this melody, not with the way Daryl Hall sings. No, this song wasn’t just aimed at a rich douchebag; this is a song about detesting someone that you also desperately want to fuck. Thus, “Rich Girl”; it had to be. And to be clear, the problem with “Rich Guy” wasn’t that it would come off as gay; the problem is that it wouldn’t. It would just be a song about some asshole, and leaving it as a song about asexual class resentments would have rendered it inert. (By the same token, imagine “Common People” if it were about a guy. Immediately half as good!)
You could argue that this change makes the song misogynistic, and I would never dare to suggest that those elements aren’t there; in fact I would argue that it’s what makes the song, it’s what gives it its charge. (I’ll say again, you’re allowed to be mad at women sometimes. Women ain’t perfect!) The fact that the girl is rich lets Hall get away with being really, really nasty, and boy, he just lays into her. She doesn’t know right from wrong, she’ll never be strong, she’s too selfish to ever love someone. When Hall sings about how easy for her to hurt others when she doesn’t feel pain, that isn’t just a detached observation; he’s been hurt by her personally, and it’s impossible to imagine that it’s not something romantic or sexual. “Don’t you knowwww, don’t you know that it’s wrong to take what is given you,” you don’t sing something that hatefully condescending without having a real personal reason behind it. The song’s opulent orchestration feels sarcastic (in the video linked above, Hall grins his way through it while wearing an ironic fancy fur coat and scarf that makes the song even meaner than it already was.) I might have talked myself over into believing that this is Hall & Oates’s best song over the course of this essay. The song dehumanizes the rich girl by saying she dehumanizes others; “it’s so easy to hurt others when you can’t feel pain.” Can’t feel pain! What a burn. The rich girl in the song gets away with everything, but “Rich Girl” gets away with a lot too. It’s complicated. It’s a bitch, girl.
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