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

Table of Contents

 

 

ALSO BY ROB SHEFFIELD:

DUTTON

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“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

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 all 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.