Maneater By Hall & Oates Is Not About a Woman?

It is common practice for songwriters to make up stories about the inspirations behind the songs they write, often years after the fact. They do this to change the image of the song to make it more friendly to changing attitudes, or to change their own image. For example, I don’t believe for a second that Summer of ’69 by Bryan Adams and Jim Valance is about the sexual position, as Adams maintains. Likewise, I don’t believe the story that John Oates of Hall & Oates told about their hit song Maneater from 1982. From the album H2O, which also contained one of their greatest songs, One on One, Maneater reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in December of 1982 and remained their for five weeks, longer than any of their other number one hits. Quite an accomplishment from such hit-making machines. It seems to be a song about a certain kind of woman. The kind that will “eat you alive,” figuratively speaking. But, no, that’s not what it’s about at all, according to Oates.

John Oates has claimed in an interview that initially, the song was about a woman but the duo didn’t want to say derogatory things about women so they decided that the song would be an analogy about New York and how the city would eat you up and spit you out and all the other cliche things about New York. If this was supposed to make the song more interesting, well, in my opinion, it doesn’t. I loved the song when it was about a woman and I never thought it was saying derogatory things about women, but only about a specific woman. The lyrics, if they are an analogy about New York, are certainly opaque, lest we believe that the city is “sitting next to us” and, “Oh, here she comes…” means the city is coming.

So what is Maneater about? I believe it is about exactly what the lyrics say it is about. A woman who eat young men for breakfast, metaphorically speaking. It was always a quite playful song, only sort of messing around. The danger that seemed to be implicit in the song is undercut, as this article in American Songwriter says, the cartoonish nature of it. John Oates himself said that it was about New York City, “after the fact.” Yes, but how long after the fact? According to Oates:

Well, it was about New York City, after the fact. I got the idea for the song because there was a woman who was very — she was beautiful but had a very foul, you know, vocabulary. It was the juxtaposition of this great beauty with this foul mouth that really kind of sparked an idea to me that she would chew you up and spit you out. But neither Daryl nor I wanted to write a song that was anti-women or negative toward women. ¹

And so they pretended the song was about the city without, obviously, changing anything about the lyrics which are clearly about a woman. So why am I sharing this? Because when you hear a songwriter’s explanation for a song, you should take it with a grain of salt. Sometimes, memories fade and at other times, inspirations are manufactured, either unconsciously or quite deliberately. It could be, in fact, that there is less inspiration and meaning behind your favorite songs that you would like to believe. But, when asked, the songwriter may feel he or she owes a meaningful explanation to their fans. It’s only natural.

At other times, a song has multiple inspirations and is made up of different ideas that come together. The songwriter may well be inviting you, the listener, to take what you want from the song and this is what is magical about a great song..there is something we can all take from it. I don’t know what we can take from Maneater by Hall & Oates except a good time listening to a catchy tune with a bouncy bassline. Like any good song, you can’t help but sing along to it, whether or not you know what “maneater” refers to, if you even care.

1. Uitti, Jacob. “Behind the Song: Hall & Oates, ‘Maneater.’” American Songwriter, 24 Dec. 2020, americansongwriter.com/maneater-by-hall-and-oates-behind-the-song/.[↩]