Cross-posted at Teamskoi
So I’m using a line from an old Duran Duran song for a post. This is obviously going to be a light, mindless post. No, it’s not, because my mind is working overtime and I need some sort of extreme sedative to calm it down.
I was on the exercise machine- the tread climber of doom- and thinking, I don’t want to listen to anything that will make me think too much. So nothing religious. Nothing classical. Nothing Rai (because I try to understand the Arabic and French and get distracted). Definitely not PiL or any of the Oi bands. No Ska. So I’m clicking through my playlists and find Duran Duran.
Great, exactly what I want. Mindless. Happy. Hedonistic. Decent beat. Will make me remember when I was seventeen and thin, to motivate me to work harder. The choices on the MP3 player at this point is one playlist made of miscelleneous songs, some B-sides from old singles. Skip that. The first album, skip that, Planet Earth might make me think too much, and Girls on Film might make me think too much about Feminist Theory and popular culture’s objectification of women . Notorious: same thing, songs like Notorious and Meet El Presidente might bring up current political issues, resulting in excess analysis. Okay, last choice is Rio. That’s great. Completely mindless, nothing challenging.
So I’m listening and I get to the second song, My Own Way. Now Duran Duran, even back in the day, was a band that put out many different versions of songs with different sleeves so that crazy people would buy sixteen versions of the same song. And some of us did. So it shouldn’t have surprised me to hear some substantial changes to the music. But it did. Especially the abscense of the opening keyboard riffs. I was staring at the player thinking, “What the Hell is this? Who do they think they are, screwing with the music?” Later on, some of the alterations actually sounded better, but that’s besides the point. I listened to a few other songs, the ones I really liked on the album, New Religion, Hold Back the Rain, and they were different too. Not so much that I didn’t recognize them, but still, I was fuming, “Who do these guys think they are?”
And to many people that sounds strange, but not to us pointy-headed cultural studies types. I remember the discussions about “ownership” of cultural things: especially writing and music. I remember being taught to analyze popular culture based on the interpretations of the consumers, and not the intent of the producers, because after all, nothing has any meaning until it’s imbued with it by those who use it. So it really wasn’t their music, the band’s, it was our music, the fans’.
Of course, pointy heads like myself make big deals about all sorts of similar nonsense, with our talk of the signified and the signifier, production and consumption, how the masses use popular culture to allegory address their issues in real life. We also talked about how we had to delineate the authentic voices of non-elites as they appeared in the writings and records of the elite oppressors, be they Medieval peasants, illiterate workers of the Industrial Revolution, or modern day people without a voice (and that could include anyone from suburban Western Youth, to disenfranchised madrassa students, to poor peasant farmers in Asia or Africa, to Amazon tribes). And if all of that didn’t make you want to bash your head against a wall, maybe you should look into a career as an academic.
We also do research and write papers about how “girl bands” or “bubble gum” bands like Duran Duran, though some of their songs and videos are obviously sexist and exploitative of women, and though they might play into anti-feminist fantasies of love and marriage, actually produce a state of fandom that empowers their young, female fans. They do this because of the whole consumption side of pop culture. The girls who consume what might be slightly or outright sexist products produced by male bands actually interpret them in a different way. They use their fandom to create a space for themselves in the public arena: the concert hall, the street, the music industry, and they make their voices heard in these male normative environments. No, I’m not kidding. I have the proposal and part of the finished product in a box in my garage. Here’s a photo of me with an update of the project in hand, meeting Duran Duran in I think 1992? I don’t know, the tour for the Wedding Album.
- On the research trail with Duran Duran
So, obviously, everything has to be serious, for some of us. Even ’80s pop stars make me think too much. All of this rant, all of this jargon, because of a few missing keyboard riffs in a song that already had three or four different versions (two of which I own on vinyl) before the version on the remastered Rio CD I bought for $3.99 in out of the Shop Rite bargain bin even came to my attention.
My friend Hafid is right. I need to clear out all the intellectual crap from my brain, all the noise, and just do something relaxing.
Maybe I’ll run for public office.
(And here’s a video of the song that started this whole thing. Note this isn’t even the version on the original album.
