Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
THE GO-GO’S - “Our Lips Are Sealed”
DAVID BOWIE - “Ashes to Ashes”
RAY PARKER JR. - “A Woman Needs Love”
THE ROLLING STONES - “She’s So Cold ”
THE HUMAN LEAGUE - “Love Action”
ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK - “Enola Gay”
CULTURE CLUB - “I”ll Tumble 4 Ya”
HALL & OATES - “Maneater”
ROXY MUSIC - “More Than This”
BONNIE TYLER - “Total Eclipse of the Heart ”
HAYSI FANTAYZEE - “Shiny Shiny”
A FLOCK OF SEAGULLS - “Space Age Love Song”
CHAKA KHAN - “I Feel for You”
PRINCE - “Purple Rain”
PAUL MCCARTNEY - “No More Lonely Nights ”
MADONNA - “Crazy for You”
THE REPLACEMENTS - “Left of the Dial”
THE SMITHS - “Ask”
THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS - “Pretty in Pink”
LITA FORD - “Kiss Me Deadly”
TONE LOC - “Funky Cold Medina”
NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK - “Hangin’ Tough”
BIG DADDY KANE - “Ain’t No Half Steppin’”
L’TRIMM - “Cars with the Boom”
DURAN DURAN - “All She Wants Is”
Acknowledgements
ALSO BY ROB SHEFFIELD:
LOVE IS A MIX TAPE: LIFE AND LOSS, ONE SONG AT A TIME
DUTTON
Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First printing, July
Copyright © 2010 by Rob Sheffield
All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA has been applied for.
eISBN : 978-1-101-43720-9
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
http://us.penguingroup.com
for Ally
“LOOK AT THE TWO PEOPLE DANCING ON EITHER SIDE OF YOU. IF YOU DON’T SEE A GIRL, YOU ARE DANCING INCORRECTLY.”
—THE KEYBOARDIST FOR LCD SOUNDSYSTEM
Introduction
If you ever step into the Wayback Machine and zip to the 1980s, you will have some interesting conversations, even though nobody will believe a word you say. You can tell people the twentieth century will end without a nuclear war. The Soviet Union will dissolve, the Berlin Wall will come down, and people will start using these things called “ringtones” that make their pants randomly sing “Eye of the Tiger.” America will elect a black president who spent his college days listening to the B-52s.
But there’s one claim nobody will believe: Duran Duran are still famous.
I can’t believe it myself. I’ve always been a Duran Duran fan. I was an ’80s kid, so I grew up on them. I watched Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes give “Save a Prayer” its world premiere live on MTV. I listened hard to the lyrics of “Is There Something I Should Know?” and pondered its existential vision of romantic love. I have studied their fashion, learned their wives’ names, bought their solo albums. I’ve always been obsessed with Duran Duran. But even more so, I’ve been obsessed with how girls talk about them. I’m pretty sure Duran Duran would cease to exist if girls ever stopped talking about them. Except they never do.
Talking to girls about Duran Duran? It’s how I’ve spent my life. I count on the Fab Five to help me understand all the females in my life—all the crushes and true loves, the sisters and housemates, the friends and confidantes and allies and heroes. Girls like to talk, and if you are a boy and you want to learn how to listen to girl talk, start a conversation and keep it going, that means you have to deal with Duran Duran. You learn to talk about what the girls want to talk about. And it is a truth universally acknowledged that the girls want to talk about Duran Duran.
My little sister Caroline understands. “It’s like talking to boys about wrestling,” she says. “You can’t just name check, oh, Hulk Hogan or Roddy Piper, because all that means is you used to watch WWF with your brother. So you have to act casual and mention Billy Jack Haynes or Hercules Hernandez. Then the boys are putty in your hands.”
I’ve never heard of these wrestlers, though I assume my sister knows what she’s talking about. But I guess Duran Duran are an obsession for me because they were the girls’ band that I loved and because I loved them at a time when I was figuring out what it meant to be a guy. So trying to figure them out is how I keep figuring myself out.
There’s a character in a Kingsley Amis novel who asks, “Why did I like women’s breasts so much? I was clear on why I liked them, thanks, but why did I like them so much?” I wonder the same thing about Duran Duran. I get why women love them, but why do women love them so much? I feel like if I could solve that riddle, I could solve a lot of others.
The Durannies liked girls. Like Bowie or the Beatles, they liked girls enough to want to look like girls. The admiration was mutual, and at this point they have been famous and beloved for thirty years. It’s fair to say that at the time, we all thought this band would be forgotten by now, yet everyone in the Western world can still sing “Hungry Like the Wolf.” Simon, Nick, John, Andy and Roger remain icons of adolescent female desire. Even the tenderoni who weren’t even born in the ’80s know what “Girls on Film” is about and nurture that special relationship a
ll ladies seem to share with John. (Sometimes also Roger. Frequently Simon. Not Andy.) How did this happen?
The ’80s, obviously. I was thirteen when the ’80s began and twenty-three when they ended, so this was the era of my adolescence, and I never figured anybody would remember the ’80s fondly after they were over. But like everything else that happened in the ’80s, Duran Duran symbolize teenage yearnings. Girls still grow up memorizing Pretty in Pink and Dirty Dancing during those constant weekend TV marathons. Any time Sixteen Candles comes on, my sisters can recite every scene word for word. (If I’m lucky, I get in a few Jake lines.) When Michael Jackson, John Hughes and Patrick Swayze died, these were national days of mourning. Every night in your town, you can find a bar somewhere hosting an Awesome ’80s Prom Night, where you can count on a steady loop of “Tainted Love” and “Billie Jean” and “Just Like Heaven.” Any wedding I attend degenerates into a room full of Tommys and Ginas screaming “Livin’ on a Prayer.” If that doesn’t happen, the couple could probably get an annulment.
If you were famous in the ’80s, you will never be not famous. (In theoretical physics, this principle is formally known as the Justine Bateman Constant.) Any group that was popular in the ’80s can still pack a room. When ’80s darlings Depeche Mode come to town, my wife, Ally, begins picking out her dress weeks before the show, even though I already know it’s going to be the short black one. And I know I’m her date for the show, and I know she will look deep into my eyes when Dave Gahan sings “A Question of Lust.” We played Kajagoogoo’s “Too Shy” at our wedding and nobody even walked out.
I’ve built my whole life around loving music. I’m a writer for Rolling Stone, so I am constantly searching for new bands and soaking up new sounds. When I started out as a music journalist, at the end of the 1980s, it was generally assumed that we were living through the lamest music era the world would ever see. But those were also the years when hip-hop exploded, beatbox disco soared, indie rock took off, and new wave invented a language of teen angst. All sorts of futuristic electronic music machines offered obnoxious noises for the plundering. All kinds of bold feminist ideas were inspiring pop stars to play around with gender roles and sexual politics, on a level that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier. The radio could be your jam, whether you were a new-wave kid, a punk rocker, a disco fan, a hip-hop head, a Morrissey acolyte or a card-carrying member of the Cinderella Fan Club. I was every one of these at some time or another—I loved it all.
But even I didn’t think there was so much going on in the ’80s that people would still be trying to figure out all these years later. I didn’t expect I’d still be trying to figure it out either. A few years ago, I went to the Rocklahoma festival, devoted to the ’80s hair-metal bands. I stood in a field, surrounded for the first and last time by thirty thousand of my fellow Quiet Riot fans, listening to the band play “Metal Health (Bang Your Head).” Was it strange? Very. Did it rock? Brutally.
It’s always weird to see how the Hair Decade lives on, even for people barely old enough to remember it. Every week, in my neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, I go and see young bands getting brand-new kicks out of ’80s beats. At the time, we all figured we were stuck in an Epoch of Bogus. The country was in horrific shape, with Reagan and his cronies running amok. It was customary to blame music for the poisonous state of the nation. Nobody would have suspected that anyone would ever go to the movies to relive 1985 (The Wedding Singer), 1987 (Adventureland ) or, Jesus, 1986 (Hot Tub Time Machine). I mean, the biggest movie of 1985 was the one where Michael J. Fox used a time machine to get the hell out of 1985. We were young, bored and dumb, so we couldn’t wait for it all to end. But something has kept this all alive. And in retrospect, the Epoch of Bogus evolved into the Apex of Awesome. Who made this decision?
Girls, obviously. As Tone Loc said, “This is the Eighties and I’m down with the ladies.” The ladies were not necessarily down with Tone Loc—but they’re down with the ’80s, and it’s feminine passion that sustains the whole mythology of ’80s teen dreams. And of all the absurd and perverted artifacts from that time, nothing keeps them feeling fascination like Duran Duran. Which is why I’ve always been fascinated too. How the hell did men and women communicate before they had this band to discuss? Fortunately, I’ll never have to know.
The first girls I shared them with were my high school pals Heather and Lisa, girlie girls who liked to talk about Duran Duran because they liked to say the name, which they pronounced, “Jran Jran.” Heather and Lisa taught me about sushi, high heels, “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” the value of earrings shaped like pieces of sushi, and the importance of never letting Lisa drive your car—but the most crucial lesson was Duran Duran. We would go out for ice cream and they would sing along with the radio, using spoons for mikes, and we would wait until the next time “Union of the Snake” or “Hungry Like the Wolf ” came on WHTT, which was never a long wait.
Lisa’s cousin was a model who was married to the keyboardist in this band, and she went to their wedding. We grilled her for the details—apparently her uncle gave a moving toast, which was drowned out by the ecstatic squeals of Roger Taylor’s date in the backless dress as he licked her entire spine, vertebra by vertebra. Lisa also had sordid backstage gossip of drugs and sex. But what really mattered to me? The way Lisa said their name: “Jran Jran.” I tried to say it that way too.
Heather and Lisa had disposable boyfriends who suffered at their hands and made me secretly feel grateful to be above such things. I was better at being a girlfriend than a boyfriend anyway. I wasn’t really living the Duran Duran lifestyle, which seemed to involve dedicating your life to traveling to distant locales where you would flip over tables and pour champagne for pouty vixens who would help you apply your mascara. I might have been a shy, bookish geek, but I was totally hung up on this pop group who were devoted to sex and glamour and danger. I loved how fiercely girls loved DD , and how fearless DD were in the face of so much girl worship. I was pretty sure I had a lot to learn from these guys.
I envied the religious intensity of their fandom. One day, you’re a perfectly ordinary suburban princess, content with Journey and Styx, and then you hear something new and all of a sudden you’re one of those girls. It’s funny because a female audience is often a fickle audience, and yet it goes both ways. A “girls’ artist,” whether it’s Depeche Mode or Neil Diamond or Duran Duran or Jeff Buckley or Luther Vandross or R.E.M. or the New Kids, commands a certain loyalty that never really goes away. An adult woman might have a slightly mocking, slightly ironic relationship to her teenage Duran-loving self, and yet she can still feel that love in a non-ironic way. And when adult women talk about them, they turn into those girls again.
That’s why Duran Duran always keep coming up in conversation, no matter where I am or who I’m talking to. A few weeks ago, I went to see a band called the Cribs at the Bowery Ballroom in New York and wound up at the bar talking to a music-industry lawyer who represents the biggest names in hip-hop. Within five minutes, she was raving about John Taylor. She’d just been in the Bahamas, staying at a posh resort where (by coincidence) Duran Duran were staying, in rehearsals for their upcoming reunion tour. She was in the pool with John Taylor, swimming past him in her bikini, trying to turn his head, telling herself, “I am swimming in John Taylor’s water. The chlorine touching his body is touching mine.”
This woman obviously loves them in a way that’s very different from how I love them, yet in some ways not so different, and I guess those differences intrigue me. Even if I didn’t share those dreams of splashing in John Taylor’s backwash, I definitely associated the music with sexual yearning, and I loved how girls would get a certain glow in the throes of pop passion. My feelings for these girls could get all mixed up in identification with the band—maybe girls would scream for me the way they screamed for DD if only I modeled my life on Simon Le Bon, and borrowed his lipliner, and spiced my conversation with lines like “My mouth is alive with juice
s like wine.” It might take years of monastic devotion. I might have to go to exotic locales and have sex with actual wolves.
When I had my first actual girlfriend, she tried putting makeup on me; I begged her to “give me the Nick Rhodes,” although I was secretly hoping she would accidentally give me the John Taylor. As a die-hard punk rock chick, she hated Duran Duran, but she liked the idea of a boyfriend who looked a little bit more like John Taylor. Unfortunately, I ended up looking kind of like Andy Taylor’s bag-lady auntie. I had to face the facts. Being Duran Duran was never going to be an option. I would have to settle for being a fan.
When you’re a boy, you sometimes begrudge the rock stars who are bogarting your share of feminine attention. When I met Peter Buck of R.E.M., he mentioned something I’d written about resenting how much girls loved his band. I was mortified, but he just smiled and said, “In my day, it was David Bowie. I was mad at him because my girlfriends liked him better than me.”
Duran Duran rank high on this chart. Boys always hated them, and there’s no way the band didn’t know it. They simply didn’t care.
The way girls raved about DD was so different from the way we boys talked about the bands we liked. I remember hours of debate in the high school lunchroom about the Clash: which was better, London Calling or Sandinista!? Is “Lover’s Rock” really about oral sex? Which member of the band truly understood the geopolitical context of Nicaraguan history? Who had a cooler name, Joe Strummer or Tory Crimes? My female rocker friends call this “boy list language,” and they won’t tolerate it. When I talk about Duran Duran with other guys, which admittedly doesn’t happen all that often, we end up debating whether the Power Station was a better side project than Arcadia. No Duran Duran chick, not even the hard-core obsessives, would sit through a conversation like that.
Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut Page 1
