RAMBLE ON: "Hip to Be Square" by Huey Lewis and the News

Have you ever actually listened to this fucking thing?

One of the movies from the last ten years I’m fascinated with is The Founder, a Social Network­-style biopic about the rise of McDonald’s Corporation founder Ray Kroc. I (and the movie) use those words carefully, because Kroc did not found the restaurant, but the holding corporation that basically stole the company from the McDonald Brothers who actually founded it. No one seems super-impressed with this movie, but for me, watching it in theaters right after the Trump election, it was one of the darkest and most chilling films about America I’d ever seen, and part of the reason was that, on a literal level, it wasn’t very dark at all. On paper, it’s dark, a man losing his soul in the name of success; on screen, it’s as bright and sunshiney as the golden arches. Director John Lee Hancock doesn’t direct darkness, visually or thematically; he sees the beauty in McDonald’s, it’s as American as apple pie, both a symbol of can-do entrepreneurship and of the idealized ‘50s white-picket-fence suburbia, even as Kroc ruthlessly steals the idea, steals the money, even steals the McDonald Bros.’ very name. Seeing the director of The Blind Side making a movie like this caused profound dissonance for me as a viewer; Ray Kroc’s shady land deals aren’t the dark underbelly of American culture, it is the culture. Ray won the game of American capitalism fair and square. I heard another critic call it Frank Capra’s There Will Be Blood, and I can’t think of a better way to put it.

I had a similar feeling of dissonance the other day listening to Huey Lewis and the News’ “Hip to Be Square,” a song made immortal by another chilling movie about American businessmen. You know it. A lot of you can recite it line by line. American Psycho never quite worked for me for reasons I was never able to pinpoint (The Rules of Attraction, for me, is the definitive Bret Easton Ellis adaptation), but it sure sticks in the brain, especially if you write about music for a living. I’m hardly alone among music writers when I say that Patrick Bateman is one of my favorite critics and I would have read every single one of his reviews; I think most of us are in awe of both his depth of analysis and his prose.  I’ve heard the interpretation that he’s just parroting other people’s thoughts he’s heard; I don’t buy it. Bateman’s music reviews are clearly in his voice – for example he repeatedly calls Whitney Houston a jazz singer and he thinks Genesis’s “Illegal Alien” is hi-larious – but there’s also simply the fact of his tastes – he loves Whitney Houston, Huey Lewis, Phil Collins, he hates Peter Gabriel and Elvis Costello. In 1988, Bret Easton Ellis wrote Patrick Bateman as someone who could wax rhapsodic about bullshit yuppie music as a way to show his emptiness. Who the fuck cares enough about sellout-era Genesis to dissect them in depth? Well, many people, actually; someone said – and I have repeated this insight many times – that American Psycho has aged strangely because his insane way of talking about music is just normal stan-speak now. But while you can and do see modern pop fans dissecting the genius of Phil Collins and Whitney Houston, I can’t imagine someone doing the same for Huey. Only Patrick Bateman would compliment a band for their “clear crisp sound” and “professionalism.” Only Patrick Bateman would think Huey Lewis is a better chronicler of the Vietnam vet than Bruce Springsteen. Put bluntly, a person who has serious considered opinions about Huey Lewis is a fucking serial killer, just as true now as it was in 1988.

I like Huey Lewis and the News just fine, for the record. I think “Do You Believe in Love?” and especially “The Power of Love” are genuinely great new wave songs that deserve to be listed alongside The Cars’ self-titled (though Lewis’s new wave roots are mostly forgotten by everyone except for obsessives like Bateman). I think a well-written pop song is nothing to dismiss, and Huey Lewis wrote many of them. But what turns off serious critics from Huey Lewis is what turns Bateman on to it — the complete lack of anything beneath the surface. They’re slick on top – crisp, clean, professional – and there’s just nothing else to say about it.

“Hip to Be Square” comes from Fore!, the follow-up to their commercial peak Sports. (It is very hard not to slip into Patrick Bateman-like affectation when talking about this band.) According to Bateman, “Hip to Be Square” is the best song on the record, about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends. That’s one way to put it. Huey Lewis and the News, the normiest and most mainstream of normie mainstream bands, was talking about his “scene,” and specifically how the image of cool rebellion had died and its place were bands like the News. Huey Lewis claims that he was a rebel once. Now he watches his weight and wears a suit. He’s not doing it out of self-improvement, he swears, it’s just who he is now, and he’s reaped the benefits. His style is popular. All the cool kids have done the same. “Those that were the farthest out have gone the other way.” It was true! There was no functional difference between Huey Lewis and Mick Jagger by that point except Mick’s dangerous past, rapidly disappearing in the rearview.

Tons of mainstream artists have noticed that their success didn’t make them cool, and many have bristled at it. Paul McCartney wrote “Silly Love Songs” almost defiantly, standing up for the simple pleasures of corniness. Billy Joel audibly chafes with anger on “It’s Still Rock & Roll to Me,” cluelessly venting about new wave and punk (I am always happy to say that “It’s Still Rock & Roll to Me” is my second least favorite song of all time). But what is Huey Lewis saying? What does he feel about it? In the movie, Patrick Bateman says it’s not just about conformity and trends, but a “personal statement about the band itself.” This is truncated from the book, and the full line is noteworthy: “It’s also a personal statement about the band itself, although of what I’m not quite sure.”

I’m not fucking sure either, Patrick! I honestly have absolutely no goddamn idea what Huey Lewis’s point is. I sense no defiance from Huey Lewis. I sense no anger. Unlike the always thin-skinned Billy Joel, Huey sees himself as a victor, and doesn’t bristle about the critics calling him a sellout nerd. He doesn’t hear them, they don’t exist to him. But I don’t hear satisfaction or triumph in “Hip to Be Square” either. I can tell that Huey Lewis sees the success of the yuppie rock scene as something ironic, weird, a reversal of everyone’s understanding of what rock & roll is supposed to be. In the movie, Bateman says that Huey Lewis has a more biting, acerbic wit than Elvis Costello. That’s a psychotic opinion, but it does make the tiniest bit more sense in the book where he’s talking about Huey’s nervy early work, before he started having hits. Four albums later, Huey is no longer that guy. There’s nothing pointed about “Hip to Be Square,” no bite beneath the glossy exterior. My mind screams that no one could write a meta song like this without some kind of perspective, but for the life of me, I cannot tell at all why Huey wrote this. Maybe it's like how rappers rap about the drug game without judgment; it's not right or wrong, it just is. Huey didn't choose the conformist life, the conformist life chose him.

And oh my god, musically this song is so fucking lame!! I guess on purpose?? To fit the lyrics?? Or the music is just as lame as always and the lyrics finally match it? But even for the News this song is chipper and dorky – something about the chirping outro (“here there and everywhere! Hip, hip, so hip to be square!”) feels obnoxious to the point of terrifying, which is compounded by the weird music video (Patrick calls this Huey’s only bad video). For some reason it is shot is extreme close-up of all the instruments; you see the keys being pressed and the strings being strummed and you see back into Huey’s tonsils as he sings but you never get a clean shot of the band or see their faces at all except occasionally bouncing around in the background behind Huey’s head. I don’t know what the intent is there, perhaps purposely emphasizing the music at the expense of the band, but the effect is cute and a bit off-putting, like a Pee-Wee’s Playhouse bit. Maybe this is why Patrick doesn’t like it. He’s a disturbing guy but he doesn’t like disturbing things; he likes comforting slop, and the video is too weird (too arty? Like Genesis’s early work?).  

“It's so catchy most people don’t listen to the lyrics. But they should!” I honestly have never listened to this song at all, not in full, until a week ago and it took me out. There’s something just screamingly wrong about it. I’m not even calling it bad exactly but it does bother me in ways I can’t articulate. I am no rebel myself, and I like mainstream music. I find Bateman inspiring, and my entire career has been trying to plumb the depths of mainstream music in much the same way he does. But “Hip to Be Square” does something to me. I once thought soundtracking a brutal slasher scene with “Hip to Be Square” was a brilliant thematic choice, but having now listened to it with my ears on, I think it’s almost too obvious, like having Tim Burton direct Alice in Wonderland. There’s no charge behind it. Just Huey’s smiling leathery face, bobbing, rocking, singing, his heart of rock and roll still beating, but what goes in his head a complete mystery.