Tekstanalyse: Maneater – Hall & Oates

Een mannenverslindster? Nee, het is een metafoor, zo tekende John Oates op in zijn memoir Change of Seasons:

The spell she cast was at once shattered and heightened as from the mouth of this goddess spewed forth the most foul, crude, and expletive-laced soliloquy I’d ever heard.

“She would chew you up and spit you out” popped into my head, lodging somewhere deep within the right lobe of my brain.

To this day when I hear “Maneater,” Charlie DeChant’s sleek and sensuous saxophone becomes the sharp, late-day sunlight slanting off the city’s steel-and-glass towers, and the song that started as an ode to a beguiling, if incongruously foul-mouthed, siren becomes a statement on life in the go-go ’80s. A soundtrack to the excesses that brought many a man (myself included) to their knees. The maneater wasn’t just the woman. It was New York City.