“You Make My Dreams” and the Retconning of a Cultural Touchstone
As kind of an addendum to my post the other day about The Bird And The Bee’s new album, Interpreting the Masters Volume 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates, I thought I’d talk a little bit about another odd little wave of Hall & Oates revivalism that’s been popping up a lot lately. I kind of hate when people talk about the 'revival' of some huge pop group and act surprised or suspicious bout it suddenly being cool to like a band that’s basically a cultural institution that doesn’t really care whether you like it at this point. It was especially surreal for me, as someone who’s heard tons of Steely Dan his whole life, to see people cop an attitude about “oh they’re cool now." Because really, once you’ve had that many hits, the music is just floating in the air forever and people are free to forget about it and then remember or rediscover it, over and over and over. That’s just how it works.
I come from a little bit of a different perspective on Hall & Oates, though. They weren’t really represented on the classic rock stations and canonical rock mag lists I got my formative education on the ‘70s and early ‘80s from. And by the time I had MTV the only time they were on it was when Beavis & Butthead were chuckling at the campy “Maneater” and “Jingle Bell Rock” clips. I’m not even sure I heard “Rich Girl” until after it was sampled on a fuckin’ Young Gunz/Juelz Santana song. But I fully acknowledge now that that’s all a product of my own fucked up personal cultural blinders, and that I’m some kind of dumbass for not knowing “Private Eyes” or “I Can’t Go For That” or recognizing them as great songs until I was an adult. And over the past few years there’s been a lot of different people reclaiming them as something worth talking about or enjoying, from Pitchfork interviewing Hall and playing up that he made records with Robert Fripp, or emo rappers Gym Class Heroes at one point planning to do a whole record full of H&O samples.
“You Make My Dreams” is not a song I would’ve considered one of H&O’s signature hits a few years ago. It climbed to #5 in 1981, so obviously it was a major hit, but considering that the single before it and the two after it all hit #1 that year (the far more iconic “Kiss On My List,” “Private Eyes” and “I Can’t Go For That”), it can be seen as the weakest link of the incredible hot streak the duo were on. Again, I’m not the best judge of their catalog, since I was born in 1982, and didn’t hear a lot of their music growing up. But even when I worked the front desk at my old job and the radio was left on to the ‘mix’ station, I heard a lot of “Private Eyes” and “Sara Smile,” and never “Dreams.” But it’s had kind of a big year, or last couple years, and while the above scene from the po mo rom rom (500) Days of Summer, which was a moderate box office hit last August, is the most high profile example, it’s far from the only one.
The above video has racked up over a million views since December (apparently “lip dubs” are a thing? YouTube frightens me, to be honest). “500 days of summer” is one of the tags on the video, so I’m guessing it was at least somewhat inspired by the movie.
However this clip, one of the more popular of the many “Keyboard Cat” viral videos that were all the rage last year (and, to be honest, the only one I was ever really entertained by), made the rounds a couple months before Summer hit theaters last summer. But the weird thing is how many more examples of the song creeping into pop culture there have been the last couple years. In 2007, R&B singer Amerie released a Cee-Lo-written single “Take Control,” which was a big hit in Europe but flopped at home, that nicks a bit of “Dreams” for the vocal melody (although the similarity is so passing that I never would’ve noticed it if not credited in the liner notes). “Dreams” accompanied a montage in the July 2008 movie Step Brothers (not unlike the montage the song soundtracked a decade earlier in The Wedding Singer), and in October 2008, Will Forte and Fred Armisen sang a song to the tune of “Dreams” on SNL’s Weekend Update. Then, “Dreams” popped up in a February 2009 episode of “The Office,” a September episode of “Glee,” and an October episode of “Private Practice.” And bear in mind, only those last two examples came after Summer’s release.
Again, numerous Hall & Oates songs are virtually pop standards, and pop up in TV shows and movies and internet videos all the time. But no one of them pops up nearly as often as “Dreams,” even much more famous songs like “Maneater.” Even on the iTunes store right now, “Dreams” is the group’s #1 seller, and I’m pretty positive that wasn’t the case 5 years ago. This kind of thing happens all the time these days. A thread on I Love Music about “songs that weren't a band’s biggest hit, but have gone on to be their legacy song and biggest iTunes seller” quickly became a list of instances in which pop culture licensing trumped chart success. “Tiny Dancer,” previously one of Elton John’s lesser hits that missed the Top 40, has become one of his most played classic rock staples on the order of “Rocket Man” since Almost Famous propelled it back into popular consciousness a decade ago. ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky” was used really memorably in a Volkswagen ad in 2003, and it feels like it’s been in a dozen movies since then. Even a contemporary artist like M.I.A. can have a song like “Paper Planes” in the trailer for Pineapple Express, a year after its initial single release was barely a blip on the charts, and throttle it into the top 10.
But these are all instances of one particular usage of a song creating an initial buzz that begets more buzz. With “You Make My Dreams,” I’m not sure where it started or how interrelated all the different examples are. Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” has popped in a similar diverse number of ways in the past decade, both before and after its infamous placement in the finale of “The Sopranos,” but that song has felt pretty ubiquitous my whole life. “You Make My Dreams” was born a year before I was, and it’s only suddenly in my late ‘20s that I’m really getting to know it. Maybe it’s just a great, incredibly joyous song (which it is) and people are unstoppably drawn to its buoyant energy, but I’ll continue to wonder if there’s something more to it.
I come from a little bit of a different perspective on Hall & Oates, though. They weren’t really represented on the classic rock stations and canonical rock mag lists I got my formative education on the ‘70s and early ‘80s from. And by the time I had MTV the only time they were on it was when Beavis & Butthead were chuckling at the campy “Maneater” and “Jingle Bell Rock” clips. I’m not even sure I heard “Rich Girl” until after it was sampled on a fuckin’ Young Gunz/Juelz Santana song. But I fully acknowledge now that that’s all a product of my own fucked up personal cultural blinders, and that I’m some kind of dumbass for not knowing “Private Eyes” or “I Can’t Go For That” or recognizing them as great songs until I was an adult. And over the past few years there’s been a lot of different people reclaiming them as something worth talking about or enjoying, from Pitchfork interviewing Hall and playing up that he made records with Robert Fripp, or emo rappers Gym Class Heroes at one point planning to do a whole record full of H&O samples.
“You Make My Dreams” is not a song I would’ve considered one of H&O’s signature hits a few years ago. It climbed to #5 in 1981, so obviously it was a major hit, but considering that the single before it and the two after it all hit #1 that year (the far more iconic “Kiss On My List,” “Private Eyes” and “I Can’t Go For That”), it can be seen as the weakest link of the incredible hot streak the duo were on. Again, I’m not the best judge of their catalog, since I was born in 1982, and didn’t hear a lot of their music growing up. But even when I worked the front desk at my old job and the radio was left on to the ‘mix’ station, I heard a lot of “Private Eyes” and “Sara Smile,” and never “Dreams.” But it’s had kind of a big year, or last couple years, and while the above scene from the po mo rom rom (500) Days of Summer, which was a moderate box office hit last August, is the most high profile example, it’s far from the only one.
The above video has racked up over a million views since December (apparently “lip dubs” are a thing? YouTube frightens me, to be honest). “500 days of summer” is one of the tags on the video, so I’m guessing it was at least somewhat inspired by the movie.
However this clip, one of the more popular of the many “Keyboard Cat” viral videos that were all the rage last year (and, to be honest, the only one I was ever really entertained by), made the rounds a couple months before Summer hit theaters last summer. But the weird thing is how many more examples of the song creeping into pop culture there have been the last couple years. In 2007, R&B singer Amerie released a Cee-Lo-written single “Take Control,” which was a big hit in Europe but flopped at home, that nicks a bit of “Dreams” for the vocal melody (although the similarity is so passing that I never would’ve noticed it if not credited in the liner notes). “Dreams” accompanied a montage in the July 2008 movie Step Brothers (not unlike the montage the song soundtracked a decade earlier in The Wedding Singer), and in October 2008, Will Forte and Fred Armisen sang a song to the tune of “Dreams” on SNL’s Weekend Update. Then, “Dreams” popped up in a February 2009 episode of “The Office,” a September episode of “Glee,” and an October episode of “Private Practice.” And bear in mind, only those last two examples came after Summer’s release.
Again, numerous Hall & Oates songs are virtually pop standards, and pop up in TV shows and movies and internet videos all the time. But no one of them pops up nearly as often as “Dreams,” even much more famous songs like “Maneater.” Even on the iTunes store right now, “Dreams” is the group’s #1 seller, and I’m pretty positive that wasn’t the case 5 years ago. This kind of thing happens all the time these days. A thread on I Love Music about “songs that weren't a band’s biggest hit, but have gone on to be their legacy song and biggest iTunes seller” quickly became a list of instances in which pop culture licensing trumped chart success. “Tiny Dancer,” previously one of Elton John’s lesser hits that missed the Top 40, has become one of his most played classic rock staples on the order of “Rocket Man” since Almost Famous propelled it back into popular consciousness a decade ago. ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky” was used really memorably in a Volkswagen ad in 2003, and it feels like it’s been in a dozen movies since then. Even a contemporary artist like M.I.A. can have a song like “Paper Planes” in the trailer for Pineapple Express, a year after its initial single release was barely a blip on the charts, and throttle it into the top 10.
But these are all instances of one particular usage of a song creating an initial buzz that begets more buzz. With “You Make My Dreams,” I’m not sure where it started or how interrelated all the different examples are. Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” has popped in a similar diverse number of ways in the past decade, both before and after its infamous placement in the finale of “The Sopranos,” but that song has felt pretty ubiquitous my whole life. “You Make My Dreams” was born a year before I was, and it’s only suddenly in my late ‘20s that I’m really getting to know it. Maybe it’s just a great, incredibly joyous song (which it is) and people are unstoppably drawn to its buoyant energy, but I’ll continue to wonder if there’s something more to it.
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