Category: Music

While we’re on the subject of eighties music, let’s remember that there was something going on other than synth pop. It’s the Seattle grunge scene that got really famous, but in San Francisco, there was an earlier anti-fashion scene full of rage, heavy guitars and sloppily dressed rockers: thrash metal.

At the moment, you can grab Megadeth‘s excellent Peace Sells, but Who’s Buying? — the song that gave us the MTV News bass riff — from Locust St.

If you haven’t already, read Part 1 below.

After the massive success of Seven and the Ragged Tiger and Arena, Duran Duran began to fragment, but productively. John and Andy Taylor, the guitarist and bass player respectively, joined up with Robert Palmer to form Power Station, innovating a kind of synthetic soul rock that would stay current for the rest of the decade. (INXS, anyone?) Their first hit was a cover of T-Rex‘s “Bang a Gong,” but they scored much bigger with “Some Like It Hot,” which is sort of a sexified “The Wild Boys.” The biggest sonic difference from Duran Duran comes at the guitar solo, in which John Taylor lets loose with a burst of Eddie Van Halen-style high-speed licks where one would expect something more layered and processed. The video is ugly but fascinating.

Less successful, and much less fun, was Arcadia, the side project of Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes and Roger Taylor. As Attack of the Clones is to the earlier Star Wars films, so is the very long video for “Election Day,” Arcadia‘s biggest hit, to the earlier Duran Duran videos. It kind of sounds like Duran Duran, and it kind of looks like a Duran Duran video, but the life is drained out of it. Somewhere along the line, they seem to have forgotten that this shit is kind of funny. (Musically, it probably didn’t help that they had Sting, David Gilmour and Herbie Hancock involved.)

Even more pretentious is “Promise,” whose video telegraphs seriousness by being in black and white and consists of doomful images of Cold War weaponry, the devastation of war and zebras fighting (no, really). The song itself is dreadful and made worse by the use of a super-trendy South African bass groove.

Duran Duran did come back together once more, in all its glory, to record a final #1 hit: “A View to a Kill.” The band seems to be having fun again, and Simon Le Bon’s yodel is in top form. In the video, they seem to be enjoying themselves immensely as they play silly spy games on the Eiffel Tower, and who can resist Le Bon’s hammy self-introduction at the end of the video as “Bon … Simon Le Bon”?

But music was moving on, and Duran Duran didn’t have an easy time of it. They released Notorious in 1986, and it did produce a major hit with its title track, but only three of the original five members had participated in the recording, and though “Notorious” is a fine example of mid-eighties white funk, the magic was gone. Against Peter Gabriel’s gigantic hit record So, with its spectacular videos for brilliant, intelligent songs — “Big Time,” “In Your Eyes,” and especially “Sledgehammer” — “Notorious,” song and video, couldn’t help but seem limp.

In 1987, Duran Duran released the video for “Skin Trade,” also from Notorious. Simon Le Bon gives a nice performance, but again, neither the song nor the video offers anything grand, new or impressive on the scale of what had come before. It’s not bad, just ordinary.

From 1988’s Big Thing, “I Don’t Want Your Love” is a bit of an improvement, especially in terms of the video, which goes back to having some kind of theme and shows some visual flair. The song itself moves in a house music direction, which at the time is actually pretty with it, if not quite ahead of the curve. Still, it’s easy to hear a song like “I Don’t Want Your Love” prefiguring EMF‘s “Unbelievable.”

After that long dearth, the Depeche Mode-influenced “All She Wants Is” is a welcome return to something like form. It’s sexy, for one thing, sexier than any of the band’s singles since their Rio days. And the video looks good, in a way that their recent videos simply hadn’t. (Also, this song has a certain positive association in my head because my middle school friend Jon’s friend Heather, a freakishly beautiful redhead who had a taste for black stretch tube dresses and was 18 but willing to let me hang out with her — I even went with her and her friends to see Aerosmith and Skid Row at the Cow Palace — could do a perfect imitation of that little moan-yelp sample towards the end of the song.)

The Big Thing period ends with an unfortunate attempt at seriousness, “Do You Believe in Shame?” a rambling ballad that steals its melody line from, of all things, Creedence Clearwater Revival‘s “Suzy Q” and should be charged with one count of Indian drone abuse.

Things get even sadder with 1990’s Liberty, which came out at exactly the wrong moment for a Duran Duran resurgence, as the slick, synthetic eighties were giving way to the earthy, grungy nineties. The results are predictably grim. The first single, “Violence of Summer,” is like an imaginary terrible song from INXS‘s Kick, and the video has Le Bon strutting around like an aging George Michael. From the band that wrote the choruses to “Union of the Snake,” “The Reflex” and “Is There Something I Should Know?” this is flaccid songwriting indeed, and the “chi-na-na-na” chant is just embarrassing.

“Serious,” is only slightly better. If it had been the product of an Australian band in the heyday of Men at Work, it might have been an acceptable hit. On the other hand, the band’s forced levity in the video — with a black guy! — gives the whole affair the feel of an ad for khakis.

1993’s The Wedding Album, then, was a surprise. This was way before any eighties revival, but the album was a hit, to a great extent on the strength of its lovely lead single, the ballad “Ordinary World,” which recaptures some of the feel of the first three albums (though mixed with a hearty dose of aging-rocker schmaltz).

The followup hit, “Come Undone,” likewise sounds a bit like Seven and the Ragged Tiger-era deep tracks, though of course its house beat is distinctly turn-of-the-nineties. What stands out, though, is that, like “Ordinary World,” it’s a lovely song.

The final single, “Too Much Information,” is a fun, well crafted little romp that includes, strangely enough, lyrics that mean something concrete. Indeed, it’s a clever dig at their own lunatic success. Musically, they’re still channeling INXS plus EMF, but they’re doing it well. (It’s also the first video in which Simon Le Bon is adequately tortured since “The Wild Boys.”)

If you were a rock band that had just had its first hit record in years, what would your next move be? Probably not a Quixotic cover album, but that’s where Duran Duran went, releasing “Thank You,” on which they cover the likes of Lou Reed, Sly and the Family Stone, and most notoriously, Public Enemy — their cover of “911 is a Joke” has to be heard to be believed.

The first single was “Perfect Day,” by Lou Reed, and is delivered with appropriate drugginess. The video keeps the mood with its color-saturated red padded cell.

More startling is their cover of “White Lines,” by rap pioneer Grandmaster Flash, which opens with a heavy emphasis on the word “white” (really). In the video, the band poses as an actual rock band, and musically they pull off a kind of thrash-funk version of themselves. The whole thing is kind of a disaster, but certainly one of Duran Duran‘s most interesting disasters over the years. After the success of The Wedding Album, this nearly killed the band.

At this point, John Taylor left the group to join Neurotic Outsiders, a metal band whose other members were Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols and Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum of Guns N’ Roses.

But back to Duran Duran. Now down to two original members, the group released Medazzaland, or at least they sort of released it. After the disaster that was Thank You, EMI at last dropped Duran Duran, and the new record was only released in the US, not in Europe. Still, its first single, “Out of My Mind” (no embedding), managed to get inserted into the soundtrack of The Saint. It’s actually not bad, and the band does put on its New Romantic duds for the video.

“Electric Barbarella,” recalling the band’s namesake, is also a kind of throwback: a techno dance song that tries (but sort of fails) to have a memorable chorus. With its sexy video, the song managed to be a minor hit in both the UK and the US, but it ain’t no “Girls on Film.”

By the time of Pop Trash, released in 2000, there was little left to the limping trio. “Someone Else, Not Me” is a faintly psychedelic ballad that is not immediately offensive.

But by now enough time had passed since their heyday that Duran Duran could sell out shows on the strength of their classic material. What surprised people was that there was new material as well, and that they liked it. The result was Astronaut, the first Duran Duran recording since “View to a Kill” to include all five original members of the band. (Poor Warren Cuccurullo, an Italian from Canarsie who had been a session musician and then a member from Notorious through Pop Trash — the lean years, in other words — was booted to make way for the lineup people actually cared about.) The first single, “(Reach Up for the) Sunrise” is not exactly a return to form, nor is it particularly compelling as something new. It somehow sounds like an old band reunited, though I can’t put my finger on why. But it exists, and here it is.

I don’t know, maybe it’s the messaginess of the songs. In “What Happens Tomorrow,” Simon Le Bon declares that “You’ve got to believe it will be all right in the morning,” and that’s a pretty good summary of the lyrics. I much prefer Duran Duran‘s lyrics from back when they were all coked up and didn’t make any sense at all.

Sadly, another Duran Duran record is expected next year.

Once there was a band that in the early eighties carved out a unique sound and image that were widely copied. They innovated constantly, taking new stylistic leaps with each album and producing gorgeous, visually sophisticated videos for their many hit singles. I’m not talking about The Cure, Talking Heads, Blondie or The Cars, but about a band usually written off as pretty-boy followers. I’m talking about Duran Duran.

Duran Duran have always been easy to mock. First of all, they were very pretty, and they flaunted it, incorporating fashion into their self-presentation. But that puts them in the same camp as Roxy Music, David Bowie and Andre 3000. Second, their sound was heavily synthetic, with every instrument, including Simon Le Bon’s unusual voice, sounding electronically processed. But again, how different is that from Devo or Kraftwerk? Third — and possibly this is what really drove the rock critics nuts — they were enormously popular.

But set aside the critics and the mockery for a moment. I remember Duran Duran from when I was a kid, first noticing pop music at about age nine, in 1983, when “Union of the Snake” was getting Top 40 radio play. I loved them instantly. They sounded great, and they still do. Other artists I grasped instantly included Cindi Lauper, Van Halen and Quiet Riot, and on the whole, I think I was right. This was before I learned which bands I was supposed to like because they were cool — before I rejected music that sounded good because it wasn’t metal, for example — so my responses were fairly pure. Not sophisticated, but not tainted either. (And not wholly unsophisticated: I’d been raised on a steady diet of Beatles, modern jazz and trips to the San Francisco Symphony.)

In my subsequent reordering of my memory to fit the historical picture, I’ve been too willing to label Duran Duran followers rather than innovators. The official narrative has groups like The Cure and Joy Division out front, but neither created the electronic sheen that was Duran Duran‘s trademark. Likewise, Talking Heads has already by 1980 invented the angular electro-funk that will define much of the eighties, but they haven’t yet harnessed it to a coherent pop vehicle. (Nevertheless, 1980’s Remain in Light has more depth, seriousness and beauty than all of Duran Duran‘s output together.)

Here’s Duran Duran‘s first video, “Planet Earth,” beautifully shot and already showing a powerful sense of fashion that is, yes, oh-so-eighties, but is also good and interesting to look at years later. Keep in mind that this is 1981, the same year that the Cure puts out the pleasant but ponderous “Charlotte Sometimes,” whose video looks downright shoddy, and “Primary,” which is pretty much precisely the sound that Duran Duran proceeds to transcend.

Next we come to an interesting bit of video that Duran Duran used as the backdrop for live performances of their second single, “Careless Memories.” It’s an anime action adventure — five years before Robotech, three before Transformers.

Two weeks after the launch of MTV, Duran Duran filmed their most notorious video: no, not “Notorious,” but “Girls on Film,” a racy melange of campy fetishes suited for projection at stylish nightclubs and clearly never meant for basic-cable TV. It is obscene, though in the super-glossy, hyperreal mode of Playboy spreads or Varga girls. It is also an extraordinarily appealing song with a killer bass line, and a video in which every shot is beautiful and the fashion, though outrageous, is also very, very good.

A curious artifact follows: the video for “My Own Way,” but not the version of the song that appears on Rio, the band’s sophomore record. This version has got disco strings, and the video is flimsier than many by the band, but the Spanish motifs do point the way forward toward the exoticism that would mark the Rio period.

Though their first record did well in the UK, Duran Duran had yet to chart a single in America. That changed with “Hungry Like the Wolf,” from Rio, which was also the first of the band’s exotic-locale videos (and a clear ripoff of the hugely popular Raiders of the Lost Ark). Shot in Sri Lanka, this video probably shares some of the blame for my Orientalist fascinations later in life.

But listen also to the sound of the song. There’s that little tootling keyboard riff throughout, and the snarling, anti-melodic guitars in the solo. And as always, there’s John Taylor’s grooving New Wave bass line.

The exoticism is even more blatant in “Save a Prayer,” the first ballad the band released as a single and a huge hit in the UK (it was not released as a US single). The video is essentially a tourism promotion for mystical Sri Lanka, and possibly the inspiration for those weird background videos that show in karaoke bars. The song itself is lovely, and the most sonically interesting trick is the hitch introduced into the main keyboard line, which mimics the unique yodel-hitch in Le Bon’s singing voice, in which transitions from one note to another seem to incorporate a leap to a third, more distant note.

For “Rio,” Duran Duran trades Sri Lanka for Antigua, and with the change comes a visual lightness suited to the song. Though it was not even close to their biggest hit, “Rio” seems to have lodged in people’s minds as the Duran Duran song and video, and you can see why. The fashion (a year before Miami Vice) is at its peak, the band is stylish and playful, and the music is quintessential: the sixteenth-note keyboard riff floating on top, the buzzsaw guitar, the prominent bass line, and Simon Le Bon’s nasal whine leading the whole story.

In 1983, Duran Duran took a step backwards to re-release their eponymous debut LP in the United States, but with one addition: “Is There Something I Should Know?” The new song, which bursts to life with a blast of supercharged tom-tom as a double-tracked Le Bon sings a simplified version of the chorus, was Duran Duran‘s first UK #1, and a big hit in the US as well. The video casts a backward glance, incorporating clips from earlier videos, but the look is certainly fashion-forward. There are endless Mondrian-inspired cuts and wipes, not to mention an interior set that is stolen two years later for the influential and then-startling ads for Calvin Klein’s Obsession.

With 1983’s Seven and the Ragged Tiger, Duran Duran continued their saga of synthetic exoticism, complete with an album cover that looked like an inscrutable Dungeons and Dragons map. Everything about the album was huge, especially the sound. The first single, “Union of the Snake,” was one of the first contemporary pop songs I ever fell in love with, and I still remember how gigantic and adventurous it sounded. Like many bands of the era, Duran Duran was moving to a kind of synthetic power-soul (with credit due to Bowie), but keep in mind that it’s still two years until Robert Palmer finds his new sound (with help from members of Duran Duran), and three until Peter Gabriel releases “Sledgehammer” (which happens to have one of the best music videos ever made).

Their followup single, “New Moon on Monday,” is not one of Duran Duran‘s strongest songs or videos, though it does showcase Le Bon’s considerable vocal skills.

What came next, though, was the high point in Duran Duran‘s career: “The Reflex,” a giant #1 hit in America and the UK. The whole song is great, but it’s that chorus, with its irresistible vibrato, that really does it — that and the clever variations on the chorus planted throughout, like Easter eggs in a video game. I remember watching this video over at Joey’s house when I was a kid — he had cable, back when that involved a brown box on top of your TV set and a lighted switch that you slid along a printed bar of numbers like a slide rule — and waiting anxiously for the cut chorus, then the “why-yai-yai-yai” chorus, then finally the “aawww, the reflex” chorus.

The video looks more dated than many of Duran Duran‘s, especially because of that terrible wave special effect. Still, it’s a good reminder that Duran Duran was a live act. Despite their processed sound, they toured constantly, and their live record, Arena, is surprisingly good.

Speaking of Arena, which you can watch online, I had a period of listening to it constantly and fantasizing about one day writing a novel that would follow its emotional contours. (The novel would, of course, be about my Lego warriors, the Sylvanians, doing battle against the enemy forces of Alto Deto on the jungle planet of Reorilia, where dinosaurs still roamed a landscape with a surprising resemblance to my parents’ shag-carpeted conversation pit.)

Arena included one studio track, “The Wild Boys,” which was to be the band’s last hurrah before they split into side projects. The video is one of their most compelling, set in a sexy sort of industrial nightmare, but there is something overly pushy about the song, something forced and too loud. Le Bon’s voice sounds tired, and the beat is a little too Frankie Goes to Hollywood. The trademark sinuous bass is stiffened. Still, the video looks really fucking cool, and that’s worth something.

For a while there, Duran Duran were, if not a great band, a band with an incredibly compelling and distinctive sound that melded a wide variety of influences into something new.

Stay tuned for Part 2, in which Duran Duran falls apart, does some interesting side stuff, and then fades slowly into obscurity.

Okay, so what the hell is wrong with Sasha Frere-Jones?

I recognize that SFJ, the pop music critic for the New Yorker, is an anti-rockist, and not much of a rocker. His opinions on UK hip-hop have been revelatory, at least to me, alerting me to the thrilling music of M.I.A., Lady Sovereign and Lilly Allen. His efforts to expose the US to the London grime scene are to be applauded, even if I don’t quite share his passion for Dizzee Rascal.

But when it comes to rock, it’s like the man’s retarded. Back in June, this is what he had to say about Radiohead:

I seem to know about a hundred [Radiohead] fans, and they constantly urge me to give the band a chance. Until recently, I hadn’t seen much point in doing so.

Okay. Fine. Not everyone has to like Radiohead. I would have been willing to let it pass — especially considering that the review was ultimately positive — except that this week, SFJ has chosen to go all jelly-kneed over Deftones, of all bands.

SFJ rightly puts Deftones in the nu metal camp, which also includes such wanky bands as Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit and Korn. (Apparently hip-hop spelling techniques are a hazard of the genre.) I dabbled in nu metal back when I was a metalhead, and I found it to be the musical equivalent of staying in your room to get high and jerk off: it sort of feels good even though it’s also sort of depressing, and even though it occasionally seems meaningful at the time, it leaves you with a hollow feeling of life wasted.

The thing is, of all the nu metal bands, Deftones sound the most like Radiohead (who could conceivably have been considered nu metal back when they were still a guitar band). First, check out the video for Minerva, by Deftones, from their fourth album, which SFJ calls “nearly perfect.” Wanky, right? But Chino Moreno’s voice somewhat resemble’s Thom Yorke’s, and the wall of heavy sound is a tool Radiohead also has in its arsenal.

Then check out the video for Radiohead’s Paranoid Android. (The point here is really the music, so just listen, don’t necessarily watch.) The song moves through moods and phases and episodes with precision, depth and clarity. Its odd noises are better, and so are its soaring melodies, its quiet bits, and just about everything else.

So what the hell is wrong with SFJ? I mean, freaking nu metal? It’s one thing to be an iconoclast, and certainly rock critics as a group are always in need of deflation. But Deftones is simply not that clever or deep or sonically interesting. The only thing I can think of that makes them worth the New Yorker’s page-space is the fact that they are not worthy, so that reviewing them anyway seems a little daring.

It isn’t. They’re just a mediocre band that sounds an awful lot like a number of other mediocre bands. SFJ has gotten away with praising a pet band of his in the New Yorker, but at the cost of revealing once and for all that he hasn’t the foggiest notion of what makes for good rock.

So The Information is out, and my considered opinion is that it’s very good — far more coherent and emotionally resonant than the scattershot Guero. That album felt like a sub-par rehashing of older Beck tropes. The new record certainly draws on themes Beck has been working since the beginning — indeed, I’ve often thought that if you pulled the lyrics from any given Beck song and put them over the right backing music, you could comfortably fit it into any Beck record — but it also strikes out in some new directions.

For one thing, there are serious raps here, which is something new. But more than that, what’s new is the overall feeling. In much the same way that Mutations, Vultures and Sea Change each had their own character, introducing us to a different way of hearing Beck’s recurring lyrical tropes (how many times can one artist sing the words “plastic,” “garbage,” ghetto-blasting,” “devil” and “hollow log”?), The Information has its own peculiar flavor.

To me, what Beck writes are travel records. I think of the early Beck records, especially Mellow Gold, as being about the deteriorating backwaters of America, particularly the South, and I fondly remember listening to Mellow Gold on my Walkman on bus trips during college, when it seemed particularly apt. Odelay continues to work these themes, mixing in a curious fixation on Texas (“Going back to Houston / To get me some pants”).

Mutations came out after my first visit to India, but it immediately lodged itself in my mind as the soundtrack of that experience. (The actual soundtrack of that experience was the Chemical Brothers’ Dig Your Own Hole, which, juxtaposed against the fluorescent-lit incomprehensibility of India’s highway nightscapes, was suitably millenarian.) Beck has claimed, implausibly, that an album named after a Brazilian psychedelic band, containing a song called “Tropicalia” and references to mangroves, mynah birds, magistrates, holy mountains and trains, is about Los Angeles. It is not. On Mutations, Beck moves his old fascination with decay to the tropics, to the Third World as viewed by outsiders whose very presence is morally questionable.

Midnite Vultures, Beck’s most misunderstood album, was superficially a return to the funkier sound of Odelay. Thematically, however, it broadened still further the theme of global decay and displacement, with references to Israelis, the Baltic Sea, “pop-lockin’ beats from Korea,” riots and refugees. (Another important theme throughout the record is the blurring of male and female sexuality.)

Looking at Beck’s albums this way, it becomes clearer how Sea Change might be the radical break its name implies. For the first time, the album looks inward, charting the latter stages of a devastating breakup and the first glimmers of hope beyond. Guero continues the introspection, if less successfully, and some of the rehashing of old musical themes came off as somehow autobiographical. The emotions of Sea Change were raw and unmediated; Guero felt like a self-conscious stock-taking.

So what next? On The Information, Beck takes off again — this time into outer space. With the increasing publicity around celebrity Scientologists, one might be tempted to see all the space talk as unironic Battlefield Earth-style lunacy, but it’s hard to see lines like “We’re in spaceships / Take a visit to the Pyrenees” as entirely straight. (Likewise, one could read the mentions of tin cans as references to E-meters, although Beck has been talking about cans in various contexts since the beginning of his career, generally as part of his trash trope.) As for the long, spacey conversation at the end of the record, which The Guardian reveals is a chat between Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze, one should keep in mind Beck’s habit of ending records with jokes and noise (Mellow Gold: squawks; Odelay: more squawks; Mutations: “Diamond Bollocks” as a hidden track; Midnite Vultures: “Debra”). Just because Beck is a Scientologist, that doesn’t mean he can’t use sci-fi imagery in non-creepy ways. Indeed, while the more outré aspects of Scientologist cosmology are utterly silly as a personal belief system, they’re actually pretty cool as a source for some rock-lyric imagery.

I’m still not exactly sure what The Information is about, but it does have a pervasive sadness and unease that feels somehow related to the high-tech, information-overloaded world we live in. And it’s quite lovely. Unlike Guero, whose surface I never felt like a penetrated, The Information has lodged deep in my skull, where I’m sure it will continue to resonate for some time.

Oh, and do check out the Guardian article. It’s a smarter take on Beck than just about anything else I’ve read on him.