Talking to Girls About Duran Duran

May 3, 2010
In this tuneful coming-of-age memoir, the glamorous New Wave band Duran Duran presides spiritually over the all-consuming teenage male efforts to comprehend the opposite sex. Music journalist Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape) chronicles his passage through the 1980s in a series of chapters in which period groups—from headliners like Roxy Music and Prince to one-hit wonders like Haysi Fantayzee of “Shiny Shiny” semifame—provides musical accompaniment to his adolescent angst. They are the soundtrack to his fumbling attempts to dance or make passes at girls, to weather a winless stint on the high school wrestling team, to survive a summer job as an ice-cream truck driver. The relationship insights he arrives at—chiefly, the imperative of unquestioning submission to female whims—are no more or less cogent than the song lyrics he gleans them from. The book really shines as a collection of free-form riffs on the glorious foolishness of Reagan-era entertainment—the movie E.T., he writes, was about “a sad muppet who thought he was David Bowie”—and its weirdly resonant emotional impact. The result is a funny, poignant browse from a wonderful pop-culture evocateur.