Talking to Girls about Duran Duran: One Young Man’s Quest for
True Love and a Cooler
Haircut
Rob Sheffield
(Dutton Adult, 288 pages, $25.95)
The 1980s are a lot like Jesus. Underappreciated in its
time, the decade went on to quite a life after death. As Rob
Sheffield notes in
Talking to Girls about Duran Duran: One Young Man’s Quest for
True Love and a Cooler Haircut, somehow “the Epoch of Bogus
evolved into the Apex of Awesome. Who made this decision?”
The decade resurrects on Karaoke night, during cable
television showings of the movie
sixteencandlesferrisbuellersdayoffprettyinpinkweirdscience, and
at eBay, where Atari 2600s, BetaMax tapes, and Members Only
jackets can be had by the highest bidder. If you remember the
sixties, the cliché goes, you weren’t there. And if you remember
the eighties, you might not have been there, either.
“It’s a sign of how 1980s teen culture keeps on resonating
— even people who were born in the '90s can O.D. on borrowed
nostalgia for the unremembered '80s,” writes Sheffield, a
Rolling Stone critic who has become a ubiquitous
presence on VH1. “Maybe that’s because it was an era when teen
trash was the only corner of pop culture that wasn’t a high-gloss
fraud.” Who wouldn’t take Square Pegs over
Dallas, The Breakfast Club over The Big
Chill, and The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now” over any number of
lame records by sixties holdovers producing music on fumes during
the eighties?
Talking to Girls about Duran Duran is
part '80s pop-culture history, part nerd memoir. Because
Sheffield’s tales of driving an ice cream truck, studying abroad
in Spain, and compiling a 0-14 high school wrestling record are
compelling only to his close relatives, memories of teenage
suburbia are made bearable by interspersing them with pop-culture
history. It is a love letter to the 1980s, postmarked several
decades late.
The book posits that Duran Duran is the Rosetta Stone to
solving the mystery of women. Sheffield maintains, “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.”
Who cares if Sheffield understands Duran Duran, women, or
love? He understands the eighties.
The geeky scribe understands that in the early 1980s law
decreed that “no female between the ages of twelve and forty
could leave the house without a killer headband-and-leotard
combo.” He understands the “feeling of expensive mendacity to all
the aging baby-boomer dramas, all those sensitive flicks with
William Hurt or Michael Douglas or Melanie Griffith backlit with
baby oil all over the lens.” And he understands that not only is
“Ashes to Ashes” David Bowie’s “most famous video — it’s an
acclaimed work of art” — albeit a bizarre retro-futuristic “work
of art” that still traumatizes weirded-out viewers thirty years
after the fact.
Talking to Girls about Duran Duran’s
unforgettable moment dovetails Sheffield’s love of pop with one
of the tragic moments of '80s music that goth kids have
memorialized ever since with black “love will tear us apart”
t-shirts. Sheffield tells of a 1980 conversation between Scritti
Politti’s Green Gartside and Joy Division’s Ian Curtis lamenting
how their down and depressing music wasn’t making any
headway.
“A week later, Ian Curtis killed himself,” Sheffield notes,
“and Green began playing disco. Ian Curtis’s old bandmates went
disco too, renaming themselves New Order. Green never looked
back. As he proclaimed, ‘Fear of pop is an infantile disorder —
you should face up to it like a man.’” This flatters Sheffield’s
tastes, but, with disco a fad of the '70s (albeit one that
reincarnates under other monikers), and The Cure embracing the
Joy Division sound and Morrissey aping Ian Curtis’s gloomy
lyrics, one could make a more convincing case that Curtis’s,
rather than Gartside’s, was the relevant sound of the coming
decade. Alas, Sheffield is a man who openly declares that he
taped over Meat Is Murder with Like a
Virgin.
Confronted with the author’s confessions that he slept
under a picture of Morrissey and “used to dream about being the
only boy in the Go-Go’s,” the reader finds such lines as, “At
nineteen, I had never had a girlfriend,” unbearably redundant.
Sheffield, ironically, shows himself as the anti-Duran Duran, the
boy the ladies want as friend and not boyfriend and the guy no
guy emulates.
Like the decade that he writes about, Sheffield’s book
loses steam near the end. Discussions of “cassingles,” “Yo! MTV
Raps,” and acid-wash jeans flounders because they marked the coda
for the eighties rather than the eighties themselves. And there’s
nothing very “Duran Duran” in all that, is there?
Looking for the secret to understanding girls through
understanding Duran Duran proves a fool’s errand. Having a number
one hit, whether one wears eyeliner and gets a haircut at the
ladies’ salon or not, enhances one’s dating opportunities.
Wearing eyeliner and getting a haircut at the ladies’ salon, sans
the accompanying hit songs, makes one as appealing to girls as a
teenaged Rob Sheffield. That’s a lesson the author of Talking
to Girls about Duran Duran has yet to learn.
