Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut by Rob Sheffield Page B
Authors: Rob Sheffield
Tags: United States, Literary, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Editors; Journalists; Publishers, music, Journalists, Biography, Genres & Styles, Rock Music, History and Criticism, Composers & Musicians, Rock, Journalists - United States, Music Critics, Sheffield; Rob, Music critics - United States, Rock music - History and criticism
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this? It was the twitchy, spastic, brand-new beat of synth-pop. For those of us who were “Kids in America” at the time, it was a totally divisive sound. You either loved it or hated it. My friends and I argued for hours over whether it even counted as rock and roll. I remember hearing a DJ explain that the Human League didn’t have any instruments. No way—not even a drummer? Not even a guitarist ? I was shocked.
I rode my bike to the public library and checked out the Human League’s Dare. This album was a brave new world. The sleeve showed close-ups of their mascara eyes and lipstick mouths on a frigid white background. Nobody was smiling. All summer long, I worked mowing lawns, listening to that tape over and over, taking it on the subway ride to driver’s ed. I spent countless hours trying to fathom Phil Oakey’s philosophy of life.
I was moved by “The Sound of the Crowd,” where Phil urged me to “get around town,” to explore the forbidden places “where the people are good, where the music is loud.” I had never been to a place remotely like this. It sounded awesome. The lyrics were a bit obscure, what with all the arcane cosmetics references (“The lines on a compact guide / A hat with alignment worn inside”—huh?), yet I devoured them. If I cracked his code well, I too would grow up to be a Phil Oakey, getting around the world on an existential quest for love action.
There were more where the League came from: Depeche Mode, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Heaven 17, Duran Duran, Kim Wilde, my beloved Haysi Fantayzee. We got all the U.K. synth-poppers a year or so after the Brits were through with them, but we were glad to have them. Any arty Brit-twerp with a magenta wedge and octagonal drum pads was a go.
They were to the early ’80s what girl groups like the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las, and the Chiffons were to the early ’60s: queen pimps of teen bathos, pumping up the drums and the mascara to cosmic levels. All these nobodies teased up their hair to fire-hazard levels and dolled themselves up into glitter-encrusted sex cookies. At the touch of a synth button, they turned into the things that dreams were made of.
The concept was New Romantic, which was a slippery term, since nobody ever admitted to being one. Even Duran Duran, who called themselves “New Romantics” in the first verse of their first single, didn’t want to get stuck with a label this silly. New Romantic songs are questing through the world or elsewhere in search of pleasure and danger and beauty. No New Romantic songs were about sitting in your room and staring at the wallpaper, even though (as far as I could tell) that’s probably how most New Romantic followers spent their time.
The New Romantics were a lot like the Old Romantics, the poets I was crazy about in high school—Shelley and Keats, Wordsworth and Blake—and none of those dead guys ever called themselves “Romantics” either. (Romanticism, like rockabilly or film noir, was a genre that only got its name after it was over.) John Keats declared, “What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the camelion poet.” Boy George sang about a “karma chameleon.” Boy George and John Keats would have had a lot to say to each other—they were both poor London boys who dreamed up an extravagant mythology of transforming the world by transforming yourself. It was a sect where you had to commit to constant personal self-reinvention. That oldest of Romantics, William Blake, declared, “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” And the New Romantics were most certainly tygers of wrath. They also obviously had a lot more fun than the Romantic poets, whose favorite recreational pastimes seemed to consist of catching tuberculosis, groping leech-gatherers and planting a deceased lover’s head in a pot of basil.
The Human League were the ultimate New Romantics, at least in terms of how we heard them in America, and they won everyone over,
I rode my bike to the public library and checked out the Human League’s Dare. This album was a brave new world. The sleeve showed close-ups of their mascara eyes and lipstick mouths on a frigid white background. Nobody was smiling. All summer long, I worked mowing lawns, listening to that tape over and over, taking it on the subway ride to driver’s ed. I spent countless hours trying to fathom Phil Oakey’s philosophy of life.
I was moved by “The Sound of the Crowd,” where Phil urged me to “get around town,” to explore the forbidden places “where the people are good, where the music is loud.” I had never been to a place remotely like this. It sounded awesome. The lyrics were a bit obscure, what with all the arcane cosmetics references (“The lines on a compact guide / A hat with alignment worn inside”—huh?), yet I devoured them. If I cracked his code well, I too would grow up to be a Phil Oakey, getting around the world on an existential quest for love action.
There were more where the League came from: Depeche Mode, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Heaven 17, Duran Duran, Kim Wilde, my beloved Haysi Fantayzee. We got all the U.K. synth-poppers a year or so after the Brits were through with them, but we were glad to have them. Any arty Brit-twerp with a magenta wedge and octagonal drum pads was a go.
They were to the early ’80s what girl groups like the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las, and the Chiffons were to the early ’60s: queen pimps of teen bathos, pumping up the drums and the mascara to cosmic levels. All these nobodies teased up their hair to fire-hazard levels and dolled themselves up into glitter-encrusted sex cookies. At the touch of a synth button, they turned into the things that dreams were made of.
The concept was New Romantic, which was a slippery term, since nobody ever admitted to being one. Even Duran Duran, who called themselves “New Romantics” in the first verse of their first single, didn’t want to get stuck with a label this silly. New Romantic songs are questing through the world or elsewhere in search of pleasure and danger and beauty. No New Romantic songs were about sitting in your room and staring at the wallpaper, even though (as far as I could tell) that’s probably how most New Romantic followers spent their time.
The New Romantics were a lot like the Old Romantics, the poets I was crazy about in high school—Shelley and Keats, Wordsworth and Blake—and none of those dead guys ever called themselves “Romantics” either. (Romanticism, like rockabilly or film noir, was a genre that only got its name after it was over.) John Keats declared, “What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the camelion poet.” Boy George sang about a “karma chameleon.” Boy George and John Keats would have had a lot to say to each other—they were both poor London boys who dreamed up an extravagant mythology of transforming the world by transforming yourself. It was a sect where you had to commit to constant personal self-reinvention. That oldest of Romantics, William Blake, declared, “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” And the New Romantics were most certainly tygers of wrath. They also obviously had a lot more fun than the Romantic poets, whose favorite recreational pastimes seemed to consist of catching tuberculosis, groping leech-gatherers and planting a deceased lover’s head in a pot of basil.
The Human League were the ultimate New Romantics, at least in terms of how we heard them in America, and they won everyone over,
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