How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Le Bon2

by Brett Warner

It’s 9:33 PM at the Detroiter Truck Stop in Woodhaven, Michigan and I’m inadvertently playing Duran Duran for the black metal band Goatwhore. Standing bored behind the gift shop checkout counter half an hour before closing time, I had plugged my iPod into the small external laptop speaker display model sitting quietly to my right, humming along to the first couple tunes on 1993’s The Wedding Album. Halfway through Warren Cuccurullo’s guitar solo on “Ordinary World”, I look up to see four very big, very pierced and very tattooed gentlemen standing directly across from me, waiting to purchase a few pairs of winter gloves. Recognizing their spooky font logo, I proclaim in the manliest voice I can muster how my old roommate was a big time fan. It’s too late, though – my metal cred is gone forever. I’ve been outed.

Apologizing for Duran Duran is a somewhat subtle art form, one that the band themselves have mastered over the course of their thirty year career. Rio and Seven and the Ragged Tiger may have made Birmingham’s Fab Five into the biggest pop group on the planet, but over the course of the next decade, Simon, Nick, and John seemed dead set on burying their teeny bop, Tiger Beat days for good. Hell, the artwork to 1997’s Medazzland even features a not-too-subtly defaced recreation of Patrick Nagel’s iconic Rio album cover. Of course, the more Duran Duran distanced themselves from the eighties glory days (Timbaland? “White Lines”?), the more embarrassing things got. So it should come as no surprise that the band’s latest effort, All You Need Is Now (available exclusively on iTunes) is earning their best reviews in ages for its 1982-era production courtesy of hipster hit-maker Mark Ronson. Just as this author has gingerly shuffled through the twelve steps of unabashed Duran Duran fandom (admission, acceptance, spiritual transcendence, etc.), it seems the band has finally learned to embrace their glossy, carefree selves again.

The Duran Duran story pre-2010 goes a little something like this: effeminately gorgeous keyboardist Nick Rhodes and stunningly handsome guitarist/bassist John Taylor form the band in 1978, playing early gigs at Birmingham’s storied Rum Runner Club. A shared love of the kitsch sci-fI film Barbarella, which starred a scantily clad Jane Fonda in the title role, leads them to assume the name of the cult film’s villain, Dr. Durand Durand. After numerous lineup changes throughout the next three years, the band’s classic lineup is established, featuring boyishly good-looking drummer Roger Taylor, sexy and brooding guitarist Andy Taylor, and the artfully striking singer Simon Le Bon. Though not particularly proficient with their instruments, the lads are – did I mention? – very easy on the eyes. Their keen fashion sense, jet-setting music videos, and frustratingly catchy pop hooks make them the biggest pop band on both sides of the Atlantic.

After about two years of solid Duran mania, things begin to fall apart: Roger and Andy split during the recording of Notorious and the band hires Missing Persons guitarist Warren Cuccurullo to fill in. The albums Big Thing and Liberty are commercial disappointments, and although 1993’s The Wedding Album is a widely lauded creative resurgence, the subsequently ill-advised covers record Thank You garners the worst reviews of their career. John Taylor skedaddles halfway through 1997’s Medazzaland, so Simon, Nick, and Warren continue on as a trio. Though musically adventurous, the album and its follow-up Pop Trash fail to make much of a dent. The original Fab Five lineup makes a highly publicized reunion in 2003, releasing the refreshingly poppy Astronaut the following year. Andy splits once again in 2006, and the band records the commercially desperate Red Carpet Massacre album with producers Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, and Danja.

In his pop memoir Talking To Girls About Duran Duran, rock writer Rob Sheffield remembers the existential dilemma of being a boy who listened to a girls’ band in the eighties:

Boys were threatened by Duran Duran, which was understandable. They were the first popular band to get dismissed as a video band, an MTV scam that gullible girls got brainwashed into liking… Boys around the world were arguing with their girlfriends, trying to explain why Duran Duran were a fraud, a smoke-and-mirrors show, an imperialist plot, a joke. They probably didn’t write their own songs or play their own instruments; they were a soulless corporate product… Lots of bands complained that Duran Duran and the other new-wave hair-hoppers were taking up valuable airtime that rightfully belonged to the American bands turning up the soil of the punk underground: the Minutemen, the Flesh Eaters, D.O.A., Big Boys or Black Flag. Some of my favorite bands grappled with the moral ambiguities of the whole DD phenomenon: X came out against them (“I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts”), while the Replacements found them amusing (“Androgynous”). These were both great songs. Not as great as “Hungry Like The Wolf,” though.

There are a lot of great songs on All You Need Is Now, from the insular New Wave paranoia of “Blame The Machines” to the jet-setting New Romanticism of “Girl Panic”. Mark Ronson knows his way around a Casio arpeggiator, and the new material has the same analogue, old school “Sex Pistols meets Chic” funky pop sound that captured the hearts of smitten girls and embarrassed straight boys more than twenty five years ago. Of course, in 2010, being Duran Duran is suddenly nothing to be ashamed about. No karaoke night goes down without one butchered rendition of “Rio” – hell, even Rock Band has a playable “Hungry Like The Wolf.” Are we already bored with our delightfully modern aesthetics filled with self-serious “important” rock music and flatly unengaging pop “sensations”? For whatever reason, even the lamest elements of ’80s pop culture have become cool again, and Duran Duran can guiltlessly make the album their fans have been secretly wishing for since side two of Notorious.

Pop music sacrifices shelf life potential for the chance to achieve that one thing, that one coveted attribute that molds superstars and makes our cultural world go round: urgency. The best pop songs sound really good for about four months, but they make such an indelible impression that, ironically, we wind up loving them forever. It’s the one huge advantage that pop music always has and always will have over rock, hip-hop, electronica, or any other new sound creeping into the mainstream zeitgeist. Pop music never apologizes for itself, and that’s why it’s taken Duran Duran this long to be state-sanctioned cool again. By embracing the disposable posh sound that made them so famous in the first place, the band has rediscovered the creative spark that alienated non-die-hard fans throughout the nineties and oughts. At their best, Simon, Nick, John, and Roger write pop music so practiced, carefree, and assured, you can defend its artistic merits to even the scariest of black metal musicians – even they know all the words to “Girls On Film”.

Duran Duran‘s All You Need Is Now is available now, exclusively on iTunes.