Daryl Hall & John Oates – Method of Modern Love
#quotefromthe80s
Style is timeless and fashion's only now
We've got the ways no one needs to show us how
M-E-T-H-O-D-O-F-L-O-V-E
It's a method of modern love
#MethodOfModernLove #HallAndOates #DarylHall #JohnOates
Generally in the world of pop and music in general, the concepts of love and modernity didn’t get along that well. Generally love was then connected to the concept of suffering, passion, perhaps expectation or regret for something that no longer exists. But in December 1984 two sublime American artists united the concepts of love and modernity in a song that still reached the top ten in America, even if it was a little less known in Europe.
In those fabulous days when the most beautiful and musically richest period of all the 80s was beginning, the two mayors of America, Daryl Hall and John Oates, were enjoying the success of their latest album Big Bam Boom and above all of the first single, the fabulous Out of Touch, both released a couple of months earlier. The second single was released ten days before Christmas, in the midst of the competition between Last Christmas and Do They Know It’s Christmas, and it was certainly a pleasant song, but not very simple, and far from trivial.
Method of Modern Love comes with a complicated title, but also with captivating music that makes it immediately fascinating, also supported by the spelling of the title in the refrain, something perhaps not immediately understandable for those who are not too familiar with English, but which in turn adds pace and charm. The song was co-written by Janna Allen, who was the sister of Sara, Daryl Hall’s girlfriend at the time.
The video is certainly very nice: in a symbolic house with invisible walls, our friends Hall and Oates are awakened one night by a guitar that shatters a skylight on their top floor premises, while strange things happen, with some cocktails starting smoking and some lamps starting to move, and they are drawn to the roof of the house where some musicians are playing while the title of the song appears on a billboard, and of course Hall and Oates start singing on this smoky roof.
Apart from the background, the video is rather simple but really nice, with Daryl Hall falling from the roof at one point, but we will find out that he actually started walking in the void, and will be followed shortly by the whole group.
If the video is clearly amusing, lyrics are certainly remarkable and talk about how love and feelings always remain the same even in a world that is changing rapidly and offer unexplored possibilities such as loving each other without meeting. Let’s be careful: today we read these things in the 2020s, and we take them for granted, but Hall and Oates had written them forty years earlier, in a world where one could only make calls using wall phones or payphones: in short, they were certainly forward-looking guys.
In the text there are some phrases that absolutely must be mentioned, such as the famous phrase by Coco Chanel which says that “style is timeless, while fashion’s only now”, or the belief that “love will always be the same, ways and means are the parts subject to change”. In short, I have no doubts in saying that this song has one of the most beautiful lyrics of the 80s, and after all Hall and Oates while making very catchy music, were absolutely not trivial authors, at all.
In short, Daryl and John had been worried for many years about how modernity itself was changing the rules of love, but they were also convinced that love would always remain the same: exactly like their great music, which after so many years is still beautiful and inimitable. The two Mayors of America were too far ahead!
Hall and Oates on Wikipedia
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