TOP 40 DEBUT: February 9, 1980
PEAK POSITION: #6 (March 29, 1980)
Imagine you’re Rupert Holmes in the spring of ’79. You’re 32 years old, and you’ve been in the music business for a decade. Over that time span, you’ve garnered some solid reviews, produced a few interesting artists, and even worked with Barbra Streisand, but you’ve never had a hit record under your own name. But now you’re making your fifth studio album, Partners In Crime, and you’ve just written a clever, catchy song about a guy slowly realizing his girlfriend is cheating on him.
Flash forward nine months to January 1980. Partners In Crime is selling well. “Him,” the one about the cheating girlfriend, has been hailed by critics as the album’s standout track. So your label, MCA Records, releases “Him” as a single. It reaches the Top 10. Billboard later ranks it the 50th biggest song of the year. For a left-of-center songwriter like yourself, this should be your major milestone, the once-in-a-lifetime fluky success in a long and distinguished career.
“Him,” of course, is not the fluky success people now associate with Rupert Holmes. That honor goes to a different single from Partners In Crime, another song written about the particulars of a cheating relationship. Unlike “Him,” that one wasn’t particularly clever at all; in fact, the lyrics basically reduce both of its subjects to fart noises at the end of a whoopee-cushion punchline. But it was catchy—and not just “Top 10 catchy.” This particular song contained an inescapable, unavoidable, brain-melting level of catchy. The kind that alters a whole career. The kind that squashes everything else in its path.
In December 1979, “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” effectively took over the Billboard Hot 100, most of pop culture, and the entirety of Holmes’ legacy. Anything that followed couldn’t help but feel like an afterthought. When “Him” hit the radio, barely two months later, it sold well, charted well, and then disappeared forever, swallowed up by the massive shadow of its predecessor. That’s the curse of Rupert Holmes: to write a smart, sneaky song about infidelity, only for the public to remember your other, stupider song about infidelity instead.
Like the rest of Partners In Crime, “Him” was recorded over a six-month span in early ’79, at New York City’s famed Plaza Sound Studios. (Blondie and the Ramones both cut their debuts there. So did Ace Frehley of KISS.) Holmes produced the record alongside Jim Boyer, longtime engineer for Billy Joel, leading a cast of session ringers while handling the keyboard parts himself. You can hear that studio slickness all over “Him,” lounge-lizard pop that unfurls like cigarette smoke in an ashtray next to the Naugahyde couch. That kind of heightened superficiality would typically be off-putting. Here, it works in the song’s favor.
Holmes’ narrator is a put-upon protagonist and a cuckold in his own home, but he’s not presented as an actual hero. There’s a disconnect between his in-song demands and the track’s own, subtle dismissal of the same; Holmes seethes with jealousy and betrayal, even as the arrangement mocks him at every turn. Frank Garvis’ nagging, insistent bassline offers nothing but false uplift, while Dean Bailin’s guitar upstrokes tick away like a particularly incessant clock. The string section enters the chorus too loudly, delivering pure soap-opera smarm and effectively turning the singer’s romantic woes into yet another daytime drama. It’s all in service of an absurdist character study, presenting a portrait of a man not nearly as clever as he thinks he is.
In 1986, Holmes won a Tony Award for composing the book of the musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood; he would later pen a period crime thriller, Where The Truth Lies, in 2003. That novelist’s eye for detail is what really drives “Him,” an entire one-act play performed in the space of four minutes. “Over by the window/ There's a pack of cigarettes/ Not my brand, you understand/ Sometimes the girl forgets.” It’s a classic trope—the unfaithful lover, tripped up by one minor mistake—rendered with just a few lyrical brushstrokes, and Holmes sets the whole thing up in just the opening lines. Listen to how the music foreshadows the twist, moving from major-key bounce to a darker minor chord right as the narrator reveals the smokes aren’t his. That’s some smart, crafty songwriting, and I’m not sure Holmes ever tops it in the rest of the song. Although with the chorus, he comes awfully close.
“Him, him, him/ What’s she gonna do about him?/ She’s gonna have to do without him/ Or do without me, me, me/ No one gets to get it for free/ It’s me or it’s him.” I love all the wordplay here: flipping the meaning from “do about” to “do without,” the emphasized repetition of “gets to get it.” There’s also a neat twist where the accusatory “him him him” transitions into the far whinier “me me me,” before finally returning to the original pronoun—but this time, critically, as an either/or choice.
It’s also telling that Holmes sings in the first person without ever addressing his lover directly. The narrator of “Him” is hurt, bitter, and defensive. But he’s not confronting his cheating partner. Instead, he’s singing to some unnamed third party: a friend? A mirror? A shrink? (This was 1979, so I’m guessing the latter.) Holmes turns the audience into a silent sounding board, but he also allows us more insight than his own protagonist. Our narrator thinks he’s a tough guy: “Time for me to make the girl see/ It’s me or it’s him.” Instead, he’s too spineless to even have this fight in the open, preferring to stew in his own juices while his significant other cavorts around town with her new paramour.
Pop music loves songs about infidelity. Most of those infidelity songs are sung from the standpoint of the wronged party, rather than the guilty one, and nearly all offer the same unassailable stance: the cheater as villain, the “cheatee” as victim. It’s the weakness of a first-person narrative; invariably, you never hear the other person’s side. “Him” functions as the rare pop single to allow us to view its protagonist in less-than-flattering light. Holmes’ narrator is a victim, yes, but he’s also a figure of weakness, a petulant man-child hollering ME ME ME! at a woman he doesn’t own and can’t control.
That third verse is the real kicker, especially since it begins with a bitter, but grudging, note of graciousness: “If she wants him she can have him/ Just exactly how we once were.” But then our cuckold immediately reverses course, revealing himself to be the same old self-centered idiot he always was: “It’s goodbye to he and I/ And back to me and her/ Without him, him, him.” He’s stomping his foot in an empty apartment. He’s throwing around weight he doesn’t possess. He’s got all the clues and still hasn’t learned a damn thing. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so pathetic.
Holmes never publicly discussed the subtext beneath his second biggest song, so there’s every chance I’m reading a lot of unintentional meaning into surface-level lyrics. But the guy beat out Bob Fosse for a Tony Award. I see no reason not to give him the benefit of the creative doubt here. Sure, Rupert Holmes might’ve hit commercial paydirt by joking about relationship imbalances (and piña coladas), but it’s his forgotten follow-up single that packs the darker, bleaker punchline; “Him” gives its protagonist the moral high ground, along with just enough rope to hang himself. Accidental or not, it’s one of the most accurate portrayals of male impotency to ever grace the Top 10.
GRADE: 7/10
BONUS BITS: In an attempt to (I assume) corner the lucrative Quebec radio market, Holmes re-recorded “Him” entirely in French under the new title “Lui.” The single only saw release in Canada, and has never appeared on CD or digital format. Also, it was not a hit. (But you already knew that.)
BONUS BONUS BITS: But what if Spanish is your preferred language? Not to worry: Mexican crooner José José recorded his own version (entitled “Él”) for 1980’s Amor Amor, the 17th studio album in a career spanning more than forty years. (José José passed away in 2019.)