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THE HUMAN LEAGUE, "Don’t You Want Me" | Dare!, 1981
One thing you can always count on: a new generation appropriating, often without much sensitivity, the previous generation’s music. The Human League’s dueling duet “Don’t You Want Me” seems to have gone through something like that recently, almost four decades after it was a hit. The younger set has discovered it, and they play it in bars, and they sing along in the chorus — together, too loudly — and it seems, as is often the case with people who sing too loudly in bars, they might be missing something. And they are: They missed what it was like to have been a teen in the ‘80s. It’s not their fault. It just is what it is.
When “Don’t You Want Me” first played over FM car radios, it spoke to — in this case — a romantic 13-year-old boy in Florida. That was the target market, it is certain. The song was like something pulled out of the early ‘80s teen pop-culture air, like something right out of an electrified game room (which is where people played video games, for those not “in the know”): the cheerily urgent, robo-synthesizer nailed it. It was just the type of thing a nerdy teen — bred on Atari and Intellivision music — would perk up to, dance to in his underwear in his bedroom, sing along with, into a hairdryer or toothbrush in front of the bathroom mirror. Speaking of the vocals, they were delivered exquisitely by Philip Oakley and Susan Ann Sulley, exactly like melancholy little robots trying to sing (and long before Alexa and Siri). The “babies” in this song are remarkably accurate portrayals of how a sensitive robot in a spacey ‘80s TV sitcom about love would say “baby.” Robot wants to know what love feels like, but he can’t because he’s just a robot with a CPU of gold. And here’s where things get interesting: As the song unfolds, as Sulley leaves her man after five pretty good years, the withheld emotion comes out in cracks of voice, in fissures of chorus harmony. It feels like we all finally got somewhere, didn’t we? We knew it all along: Even robots fall in love.
So. Now. When we, members of an older generation, hear “Don’t You Want Me” in a bar occupied by all the young ones (What are we doing here, anyway?), it brings back waves of hyperspaced, hormoned nostalgia (not to mention, the all-too-familiar acknowledgement these days that certain lyrics have not “aged well” — in this case, the Oakley-Robot is threatening the career of the Sulley-Robot simply because she has moved on). Maybe the young ones kind of get it. They seem pretty smart, even if they still owe the world their versions of Kurt Cobain and the Beatles. In the meantime, as they sing along, some of us are overcome with memories of a comb in the back pocket, squeaky-new topsiders, the cinnamony-sweet waft of Polo cologne, the chaotic blasts and reverberations of Robotron, and Yvette (a girl we once crushed on) in her Jordache jeans. “Don’t you want me, baby?” we sadly sang to ourselves then, looking out the rolled-down passenger window of our parents’ car, the soft and humid wind our only true companion. “Don’t you want me, ohhhhhhhh?” This is a feeling we want to hold onto, one we would never want to let loose from our bodies — particularly into the air of a bar.
