What Did We Learn: Talking to Girls About Duran Duran

For people my age (born in the mid to late ’70s), the ’80s are a weird phenomenon. We were there; we were paying attention; and the music undoubtedly played an important role in forming our musical tastes, but understanding the shift from the prior era, the juxtaposition versus classic rock, the technology involved, and frankly, the broad-scale dumbing down of music: that was all lost on us.

Wait, you mean Duran Duran wasn’t always there to provide the theme music for the Hot Tub scene in Hot Dog: The Movie? Huey Lewis wasn’t even cool despite the fact that Marty McFly was the living, breathing messiah? Roller skating parties actually existed before Cyndi Lauper? And, parachute pants weren’t even the most important articles of clothing from the ’80s, headbands were? Aye Dios Mio.

See, you can learn a lot from this book. Whether the ’80s to you represent a Momentary Lapse of Reason, the annals of pop culture or a Total Eclipse of the Heart, what follows is a list of some of the goofy eye opening realizations from the story. However, before you dig in, please be advised of the SPOILER ALERT.

8) The 1980s actually ended in 1991 when John Oates shaved the Oatestache – Boogie Nights will have you believe that the ’80s sang their swan song with Sister Christian, followed by people immediately donning turtlenecks and doing copious amounts of cocaine, but it was really the day that John Oates decided to stop looking like a cross between Lionel Richie and Dennis Eckersley that the ’80s ended.

7) Always perform your guitar solos somewhere awesome – With the advent of the music video, the ’80s taught us that if you’re taking a guitar solo, you should highlight the spectacular show of force by taking it somewhere awesome, preferably standing on top of something where there’s a brisk wind blowing. For reference, consider a mountaintop (Tears for Fears), a glacier (Echo and the Bunnymen), a urinal (Dave Edmunds), a riverboat (Culture Club), an empty pool (Bryan Adams) or at the lumberyard (Journey).

6) New Wave stretched further than you might think – What do Herbie Hancock, Neil Young, the Grateful Dead, Phill Collins, Billy Joel, Linda Ronstadt, Alice Cooper, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Van Halen, and Dean Martin all have in common? They all took a stab at cashing in on a new wave album during the height of the craze.

5) How to discern whether or not a song is new wave – At the end of the day, assessing a song’s new wave cred is more art than science, but Sheffield gives us some foolhardy guidelines to follow for classification. Songs about shoes, pants, or hair; songs with German singers or singers you thought were German; and songs about nuclear war or gay sex and nuclear war are all decidedly new wave. Substituting a drum solo for the word “ass” as a last second audible is the cardinal sin of new wave for which Huey Lewis is damned to an eternal life of being not-new-wave.

4) You must respect the cream – For a radio-loving teenager, driving an ice cream truck can be the greatest job on Earth, but you must follow an unspoken code for respecting the cream and be wary of a few key tenets. 1) If you listen to R.E.M., the kids will probably make fun of you. 2) Snow Cones are extremely high risk, so you must be nimble with a backup cone, because if that ice hits the ground (which it often does), it’s waterworks. 3) Bomb Pops suck. 4) Never play a stupid jingle when all you need is a bell. 5) And most importantly, don’t make people line up at the truck, it’s both stressful and indicative of foul play.

3) Cassingles, absurd as they may be, served a critical function in the music business – Without the cassingle, the careers of of one (maybe two) hit wonders like Tone Loc, the Fine Young Cannibals, Neneh Cherry, Sir Mix a Lot, and Sophie B. Hawkins would be nowhere. It’s right up there with the Pocket Rocker as a means of over-saturating the world with crappy hits. Admittedly, I was a bit sad to see that the only cassingle I remember owning, a royal blue cassette of Roxette’s Dressed for Success, didn’t make the cut.

2) Rob Sheffield may or may not have been responsible for Debbie Gibson’s punk transformation – Rob and his girlfriend actually made Debbie a gift bag before her Boston show which included a punk mixtape and a stuffed teddy bear (she collected them from fans). While venue security prevented them from getting the gift up on stage, they managed to track down the actor from the Lost in Your Eyes video in the crowd, introduce themselves, and convince him to make the drop.

1) The ultimate goal of a band should be to make it fun – This is my favorite quote of the book right here, which came in a description of the Replacements, “Some bands just lend themselves to that fantasy, like Lynyrd Skynyrd or Earth, Wind, and Fire – they looked like you could just drop in and they wouldn’t even notice if you were hanging around for at least two albums.”

One bone of contention – If you weren’t born by 1985, Rambo has been written out of history?  Less known than Delta Force? These are totally outrageous claims. I remember leafing through a surplus store catalog and coveting a Rambo survival knife like it was a Red Rider. I think of Rambo as just a notch below Rocky in terms of a household name. Otherwise, great read.