Duran Duran: The Saga Continues. Part Two.

Okay, so in preparation for today's blog post, I played a lot of Duran Duran songs. I haven't listened to a Duran Duran song (well, aside from my nom de blog namesake) for months and months, and listening to those songs was like coming home again. Even after being aurally excited by a seemingly countless stream of musical artistry, if I listen to a Duran Duran song, particularly one I especially adore, I still sense that powerful element of magic that originally drew me to the band in the first place. I think I almost ended up repeating "Hold Me", which was one of my favorite songs when I was a teenager, but was stopped from doing so via time constraints.

So. Duran Duran. What about them makes me respect and adore them as much as I do? I suspect that part of it has to do with the fact that they were my gateway to a sort of alternative music culture to the ones I'd been exposed to throughout my early childhood. Anything and everything I've been a fan of from the very day I fell for my very first Duran Duran song ("Hungry Like The Wolf" if you don't know me well enough by now) is either directly or indirectly caused by Duran Duran. My love affair with this band has lasted longer than a lot of marriages. Fifteen and a half years is an awfully long time for someone who is almost halfway toward year number 28 of her existence. And sure, right now I'm not exactly the biggest champion for this band's recent career decisions, yet -- I'm defending them right now on this blog, aren't I?

I suppose, though, that no matter what the band do, no matter the number of missteps I see them committing in the present day, they will always be responsible for much of the music-derived happiness I have experienced for the decade and a half-plus time period I have been listening to their music. Their music has also provided for the very template I use, consciously and subconsciously, to determine whether or not a piece of music has me in thrall. It is because of Duran Duran that I value highly the presence of a synth or a synth-like sound in the music I listen to. It is because of Duran Duran that I don't look down upon music that has all the distinctive hallmarks of the '80s; I find glossy production, echoey Linn-like drumming, and glimmery Fairlight CMI synth action to be what I most favor about music in all but a few exceptions. It is because of Duran Duran that I have to listen to music that features a very strong rhythm section that throbs its way into the core of my being, even if it isn't transparently funky or danceable.

But -- why Duran Duran? Why did it take them to make me swoon first, swoon the most, swoon the longest? I once posited that it could have come from my musical background, the very music my parents exposed me to when I was little. My mother subsisted on a diet of '50s proto R&B and '60s - '70s Motown and exposed me to oldies radio in the process of feeding her need to listen to Aretha or Gladys or Ray, and while I listened to the oldies I enjoyed not only those classic R&B songs but also the music from the first British Invasion, as well as the candy-coated harmonies of groups such as The Mamas & The Papas and The Beach Boys. My dad favored the music of the '40s and '50s and anything else that was smooth and relaxing and we bonded over our shared appreciation for big band music, its big, warm, lush sounds evocative of a feeling of bonhomie that I became a fan of. All of those elements combined together to create what I considered a blueprint for what I would look for in a musical artist, and the blueprint became an inscrutable puzzle by the time I hit the double digits age-wise and started to want to drift away from what my parents listened to. I eventually tried out classic rock radio for a few months, but wasn't happy with most of what I listened to. What I didn't know was that the solution to the puzzle wouldn't come from the radio but from TV.

Actually, I had no idea music television existed in the first place. Even though I was a little girl during a decade that was shaped in part by MTV's flashy style, my household was an MTV-free zone throughout the '80s. My parents were slightly older than the norm (they were in their mid 30s when I was born) and so they did not enjoy that kind of entertainment. And even though I was pretty much unrestricted in terms of what pop culture I was exposed to, I tended to gravitate toward more staid television choices such as the Weather Channel or "The Munsters"/"The Addams Family" reruns on TBS. I didn't even know what "MTV" stood for, which is why when I was at home alone after school as a "latch key kid", I never bothered with that channel. But when I became a preteen, I began to be curious about the full spectrum of entertainment choices that were on cable, so one day in a fit of pique I decided to flip through the channels. What I stayed stuck at wasn't MTV, it was VH1, and it was that day in the autumn of 1991 that I got my first peek at what a "music video" is. I think my actual first music video experience consisted of the last minute and a half of some Rod Stewart video, but it was enough to raise my curiosity levels and make me want to put down the remote. Which I remain grateful for because what I saw next literally changed my whole life.

At first I marveled at this mini-film I was watching. It looked like a part-travelogue, part-drama. The scenery was breathtaking. The males being featured on the screen were very attractive. The action was hyper-intense, almost like an Indiana Jones movie. And the MUSIC -- the music was the answer to the puzzle. It contained everything I was looking for in a piece of music; it was melodic, it had an intense rhythm, it was big and warm and lush, and it made me feel like no other piece of music had ever made me feel before. It affected me to my core and it, combined with the visuals, created an addiction in me. I had to find out more. So I spent every free moment I had glued to the TV, to this new and strange channel that played something called "music videos", in hopes of catching what I had seen again. It didn't help matters that this channel was being shared by a comedy channel, but after over a month of waiting I saw it again, and this time I knew to look at the informational chyron at the bottom left hand corner of the screen. "So the name of this band is apparently called 'Duran Duran' and the name of the song is 'Hungry Like The Wolf'? Strange. But I love this. I have to have more of this." And in December of 1991 I had to have it enough to where I gathered up the courage to have Mom take me to a secondhand music store, where I purchased a copy of Rio on cassette with my babysitting money.

From that moment on, a new blueprint was drawn up, one that drew its patterns and designs from the elements I heard evidenced on the Rio album, which incidentally I was later to find out was the third U.S. pressing version of said album, featuring remixes by David Kershenbaum on half of the album. (So you foreign folks will be familiar with a different version of this album than the one I fell in love with.) Soon thereafter I came into possession of two more Duran Duran cassettes (their debut album and Seven & The Ragged Tiger), then I came across a Duran Duran scrapbook at a flea market, and from that point on there was no looking back. My Japan fandom came as a result of seeing them mentioned in the scrapbook, then more VH1 viewing led me to more British artists who hit their commercial peak in the '80s such as Spandau Ballet, then that led me to want to watch anything '80s music video-related, which led me directly to MTV, and from that moment on I was able to form the foundation upon which virtually all of my musical tastes have been built.

Wow, I think I'm going to need a part three to this. More tomorrow, it looks like....