Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut

by Rob Sheffield

  I will always love the Clash, because I loved them so much when I was fourteen, and I love how you can start a conversation with almost literally any dude about the Clash. For instance, if you are a dude, you are still stuck halfway through the last paragraph, spluttering, “London Calling is much better than Sandinista!” This is just the way we dissect the things we love. But it’s tougher to talk to women about the Clash. (They love “Stand by Me” but they don’t care that it’s really called “Train in Vain” instead of “Stand by Me.”) So Duran Duran are a much bigger part of my day-to-day life.

  I still feel like I have a lot to learn from Duran Duran. They’re Zen masters on the path of infinite sluttiness, shower-nozzle heroes devoted to inspiring female fantasies. One of the things I admire about them is how they sincerely do not give a shit whether boys like them. They surrender gracefully to the female gaze. They still wear the makeup, they still dress like tarts, and every time they do a reunion tour, they play the hits they know will make the Durannies scream. They have never sold out their girls, and there’s nothing about them that would evoke the dreaded words “guilty pleasure.” As Oscar Wilde said, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man knows what a pleasure is.

  The songs in this book are some of my favorite ’80s relics, the songs that warped my brain with dubious ideas, boneheaded goals, laughable hopes and timeless mysteries. They might not necessarily be the greatest songs of the pre-Snooki era, or the most important, or the most popular. But they’re all songs I love. And they add up to a playlist that gives a taste of that moment. In a way, you could think of these songs as Bobby Brown’s pants. There’s an episode of VH1’s trashy reality show Celebrity Fit Club where everyone sits around the bonfire. They’re supposed to bring some personal possession that represents the old life they’re leaving behind, so they can toss it into the fire. Bobby Brown holds up a pair of baggy, sequined pants that could only come from the ’80s and says, “You know I had to be high to buy these.” (Sebastian Bach nods. He understands.) But I’m not tossing these songs into any kind of fire—I’m just shaking them to see what memories come tumbling out. And of course, a lot of those memories have to do with love, and learning about love through pop music.

  It’s complicated, the way we use pop culture artifacts in our day-to-day emotional relationships. The popular stereotype of this is the overbearing boyfriend who tries to get his girlfriend to appreciate free jazz, football or World War II documentaries—but everyone knows it goes both ways. Consider Pretty Woman, a movie that only exists so women can force their boyfriends to watch it. Your boyfriend has probably seen it more times than you have, once for every relationship. (Never more than once—unless something was seriously wrong.) And while you may kid yourself he thinks the women are hot, he’s really just showing off that he’s man enough to take the punishment. When you’re a guy watching Pretty Woman with your girlfriend, you are Julia Roberts in the scene where Richard Gere takes her to the opera to see if she cries, because if she does, it means she’s sensitive and deep and worthy to operate Richard’s gear. Watching this scene on a date, you’re the pretty woman, the ho on display in the opera box. And maybe you really do want to cry, if only because the supposed opera music is just the piano riff from Bruce Springsteen’s “Racing in the Street.”

  But there’s nothing at all wrong with an exchange like this. As a boy, experiences like this are part of learning girl languages. What else is pop culture for? Since I grew up with rock-and-roll parents, bonding over the songs they loved, it never really occurred to me that love and music belonged in separate categories. When my mom and dad were growing up as 1950s rock and rollers, both sang “In the Still of the Nite” with their respective high school friends; my mom took the lead while my dad took the “shoo-doo shooby-doo” part, so they were a natural match. I’m sure that my mom and dad would find lots of other ways to bond if they didn’t have music. But bringing people together is what music has always done best.

  Learning to speak girl languages is a tricky business. Since I am married to an astrophysicist, I am constantly looking for ways to drop the Kuiper belt or Oort cloud into conversation. I try to impress Ally by making clever references to 3753 Cruithne, the earth’s little-known “second moon,” although it’s more precisely described as a dynamic gravitational companion. I don’t know if I impress her, but she appreciates the effort. She likes lots of ’80s goth bands that I hated at the time—The Sisters of Mercy, Love and Rockets, Nitzer Ebb—but I love them now, because they’re part of her language. She likes noisy, spazzy math-rock bands that only boys like, so she is also used to speaking boy languages. She’s the only person I’ve ever met who can critique the accuracy of Google Mars as well as the Birthday Party discography.

  But it’s possible we will never agree on anything the way we agree on Duran Duran. Something in the music keeps promising that if I could finally figure out Duran Duran, I would finally understand women, and maybe even understand love.

  Loving Duran Duran has been one of the constants in my life, but I have no idea what they would sound like if the women in my life stopped loving them. I guess I’ll never know. I could claim that Duran Duran taught me everything I know about women, but that’s not exactly accurate: I learned it from listening to girls talk about Duran Duran.

  THE GO-GO’S

  “Our Lips Are Sealed”

  1980

  It was my first coat-and-tie dance, and I couldn’t get out of it because I’d told my sisters about it. They put some serious muscle into dressing me up. All three of my sisters got in on the act—Ann was thirteen, Tracey was twelve, Caroline was only four—and even though I was the oldest at fourteen, I had no authority to say no. I was desperate to get out of the dance and do what I always did on a Friday night, which was stay home and watch The Dukes of Hazzard, but there was no way I was getting out of this. My sisters were intent on dolling me up. My coughing fits and “I think I’ve got the consumption, I mean mumps, or maybe scarlet fever” routine did nothing to fool them.

  So instead of spending my quality time with Bo, Luke, Daisy and the General, I was getting my hair did. The soirees at the Milton Hoosic Club were swank affairs, with a live band to play “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Cocaine” and the same songs every band played at any teen dance. But I was going to look spiffy. My sisters strong-armed me to the sink, bent me over the basin, and shampooed me. Ann picked out one of my dad’s ties while Tracey put conditioner in my hair. They sent Caroline to ask Mom if they could shave me.

  “Mooooom?”

  “Go ahead,” my mom said, trying to concentrate on her book. “No blood, okay?”

  There wasn’t much legitimate stubble on my chin—I had just turned fourteen—but a few minutes later, there was foam on my face and a general consensus that debris had been cleared. Then they went for the fuzz at the back of my neck. I sat stoically while Tracey blow-dried my hair and Ann brushed it. They taught me to shine my shoes and supervised as I brushed the Cheetos dust out of my braces.

  A couple hours later, I was officially dressed to kill. My sisters circled me with hand mirrors, approving their handiwork from every angle. Tracey proclaimed, “Our little baby’s growing up!” Ann folded a handkerchief for the pocket square and pinned my corsage.

  If I’d had a date for the dance, she might have been impressed by my slick surface. But I didn’t. In fact, all I remembered about the dance was watching the band—the guitarist had a six-foot plastic tube attached to his microphone stand and a jug of Jim Beam at his feet, so he could liquor up during the band’s heartfelt rendition of Foghat’s “Stone Blue.” I was stone blue about missing my date with Daisy Duke.

  But I knew better than to give my sisters any back talk. These were ferocious Irish girls and they drilled me well. In fact, when I saw the movie Mean Girls, I kept wondering when the mean girls were supposed to show up—I mean, all due respect to Lindsay Lohan and crew, but my sisters would have eaten these chicks for breakfa
st.

  My sisters were the coolest people I knew, and still are. I have always aspired to be like them and know what they know. My sisters were the color and noise in my black-and-white boy world—how I pitied my friends who had brothers. Boys seemed incredibly tedious and dim compared to my sisters, who were always a rush of energy and excitement, buzzing over all the books, records, jokes, rumors and ideas we were discovering together. I grew up thriving on the commotion of their girl noise, whether they were laughing or singing or staging an intervention because somebody was wearing stirrup pants. I always loved being lost in that girl noise.

  Yet there are so many things my sisters know about each other that I never will. They constantly laugh about private jokes I don’t get, quote movies I haven’t seen, nurse each other through crises they wouldn’t even tell me about. They know all the symptoms when one of their kids is sick. They fight, they make up. They explode and then go right back to loving one another as fiercely as ever. It’s one of the millions of secrets they share that their brother will never understand.

  It’s still dramatic when my sisters get together, and it always will be. In any family function, my role is to race from sister to sister saying, “She didn’t mean it.” It’s like an opera with too many duchesses in one castle. Just a few years ago, when we were all supposed to be adults and beyond such things, my sisters kicked my mom and dad out of the house so we could have an evening at home, just us—my three sisters, their three boyfriends, and me. (One of these boyfriends was a husband.) We played board games by the fire, and perhaps a beverage or two was consumed. Then Ann mentioned the word “dollop.”

  This is an extremely loaded word in our family, because of an incident a few years ago when Tracey wanted to use some of Caroline’s fancy shampoo, you know, expensive shampoo. Caroline wouldn’t let Tracey use it. Not even a dollop.

  “I swear, I’ll only take a dollop.”

  “No.”

  “I can’t have a dollop of your shampoo?”

  “No.”

  “You can’t spare a dollop? One dollop?”

  “No dollops.”

  “Your own sister?”

  Ever since the dollop incident, the word is dynamite, and nobody uses it. But on this occasion, Ann asked Caroline to pour her a dollop of Baileys. Eye contact was made, angry words were spoken, and my sisters raced upstairs to settle this matter in private. It took them about twenty minutes. They came downstairs all lovey-dovey, and we went right back to the game.

  But in those twenty minutes, I sat there on the floor with all three boyfriends. I kept the conversation going—if I remember correctly, we were arguing about the U2 discography, and whether Zooropa was not in many ways superior to The Joshua Tree. The boys kept making nervous glances upstairs. I was like, “Don’t look at me, dude.”

  In the immortal words of Keith Richards, “It’s weird to be living with a bunch of chicks.” But that’s how I lived. To me, it seemed like a dreary waste of time not to be surrounded by bossy, zesty, loudmouthed girls. We’ve always been a loud family—it’s fair to say that we’re always the “problem table” at any wedding—and it’s my sisters who pump up the volume. We like to sit at the kitchen table and talk, then drink in the living room and sing Irish songs. Mom calls out the requests for each one of us to sing, and although our voices might not get any sweeter as the night goes on, we do get louder, making up in enthusiasm what we lack in accuracy. Then we go back to the kitchen table for more talk. Since Ann and Tracey have always been tall like me, each one could talk into a different ear. I learned to take two sets of orders at the same time.

  My grandmother tried explaining all this to me when I was a little boy. Nana was from County Kerry, in the old country, and she explained it was the way of our people—my sisters were always going to order me around. The Irish marry late, because they tend to starve to death if they give themselves too many mouths to feed, so the mother on an Irish farm tends to be old by the time she starts having children. That’s why the eldest girl is the one who runs the farm. My grandmother was an oldest daughter, so was my mom, and so was my sister Ann. I come from a long line of Irish men who live with oldest daughters, and they basically learn to survive by washing a lot of dishes and keeping their mouths shut. My grandmother warned me that it would always be this way, but I was too young to understand. Yet meanwhile, Nana would call my sisters after school to tell them to go into the kitchen and fix me a bowl of ice cream, and maybe a milk shake with a raw egg in it for protein. And they would. Why?

  Like any kid, I longed to be someone else, so I was fascinated by pop stars who were garish and saucy, awakening the slatternly Valley girl in my soul. I wore Psychedelic Furs and Pretenders pins on my Barracuda jacket in hopes of impressing the new-wave girl I was sure to meet any day now. Then I came home from school to watch General Hospital with my sisters. Dr. Noah Drake was the man—how I yearned to rock that mullet-and-lab coat look. I would have totally copped Scorpio’s accent if I thought my sisters would let me get away with it. Eventually they switched to Guiding Light, the more mature woman’s choice, but I still think of Laura, which is one of the many things I have in common with Christopher Cross.

  Every day during those years, I walked to school over a tiny iron bridge blasted with graffiti dedicated to Ozzy. “Welcome to Ozzy’s Coven!” it said, alongside graphic depictions of Iron Man, or maybe that was just the devil wearing a hockey helmet. Either way, it was imperative to get over the bridge before the high school kids got out of school, because then it became a place for them to blast their boom boxes, smoke, drink, get high and look for something to punch out, which was obviously where I came in. If the high school kids got to the bridge first, you had two choices: either walk a couple miles out of your way or run the gauntlet.

  Across the bridge was the grassy hill that the cops set fire to every summer, because the kids had planted weed there, always a seasonal highlight for the budding pyros of my neighborhood. There was a streetlight next to the bridge that the town installed just to discourage kids from hanging out after dark, but they seemed to revel in the spotlight, blasting “More Than a Feeling” and “Cat Scratch Fever” and “Iron Man” on their radios until the cops would come chase them away. Some nights we went down by the bridge to watch the high school kids who were actually on the bridge, hanging out and looking cool in their own desolate honeycomb hideout, even if they were inhaling Pam out of paper bags. Ozzy and Zeppelin were singing to them, not really to me—they came to proclaim the hippie dream over and celebrate the burnout losers of the new world.

  The bridge is still there, but it now looks tiny and dumpy, just a twenty-foot slab of rusted iron painted green, hardly the sort of real estate you imagine Satan and his minions would bother fighting over. But at the time, it was an epic battleground, a catwalk fraught with fright and dread and blood. I guess every American town had one of those—it was the battle of evermore.

  I was the oldest kid in our house, so I was fascinated by other people’s older brothers and sisters. I was thirteen when the ’70s crashed into the ’80s, and the prospect of all that adolescent angst stood before me like that bridge. I worshipped our babysitter, Patty, an Irish girl with red hair who took no shit from us at all. One night, my sisters and I badgered her into telling us The Omen as a bedtime story. She went through the whole movie scene by scene, stab wound by stab wound. I don’t know how long she spent narrating the fable of Damien and his demonic conquest of the planet—maybe it took as long as it takes to watch the actual movie—but my sisters and I just screamed along, perched on the edge of the ’80s.

  My sisters actually got to hang out with the older girls because they were on the basketball and field hockey teams. They would shoot hoops with the basketball chicks listening to F-105, and when anyone sank a basket, they would yell “Jojo COOKIN’!” which was the inexplicably thrilling catchphrase of the ranking disco DJ in town, Jojo Kinkaid. The debate over whether Jojo was cool or not still rages on in some ext
remely specialized circles, but one thing is for sure: he was cookin’.

  When Ann and Tracey were on the basketball team, they used to ride the bus with the older girls who blasted the radio and taught them hand dances to go with the songs. There was a hand dance for Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” another for “You Should Hear How She Talks About You.” I never felt more like a boy than when I was trying to learn the hand dances. Ann and Tracey tried to teach me those, but I never could crack the girlie handclap language. They would do their handclap routines, “Miss Lucy Had a Steamboat,” or “Bubblegum, Bubblegum,” or “The Spades Go Two Lips Together.” Every time they tried teaching me to clap along, my hands would trip over each other. I watched the girls at recess clap their hands and wondered when I would crack the code, maybe with some help from the mythical Lady with the Alligator Purse.

  Rhythm was girl code, which is why I was obsessed with the claps, but I never got it right. Handclaps were the difference between boy music and girl music. Boys noticed the vocals, the guitars, while the real action was going on down below, where only girls could hear it. All my sisters’ favorite songs had great handclaps, and I could never learn them. It was all I could do to learn the claps in the Cars’ “My Best Friend’s Girl” (CLAP clap, CLAP clap) or “Let’s Go” (CLAP clap, CLAP clap clap, CLAP clap clap clap, let’s go), or “Bette Davis Eyes” (clap CLAP , clap CLAP).

  One time, Tracey came back from a school dance, laughing about how terribly this one guy danced. “They played ‘Private Eyes,’ and he was trying to clap along. He went ‘Private eyes, CLAP CLAP, they’re watching you, CLAP CLAP, they see your every move.’ ”