Annie Zaleski - Duran Durans Rio

RIO
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Forthcoming in the series:

Band of Gypsys by Michael E. Veal

Timeless by Martyn Deykers

Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 by Colin Fleming

Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik

The Archandroid by Alyssa Favreau

xx by Jane Morgan

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To my husband and permanent plus one, Matt, and my parents, who never told me to turn down the music

Rio

Annie Zaleski

Contents

Introduction

1 The Road to Rio

2 Writing and Recording Rio

3 Why Rio Matters

4 Duran Duran, Video Pioneers

5 Winning Over US Radio

6 1983: The Year of Duran Duran

Rios Impact and Resonance

Acknowledgments

Works Cited / Source Material

Index

Context is everything when it comes to formative musical influences. I first heard Duran Durans Rio not in the hair-sprayed 1980s, but sometime in the grungier mid-1990s. As a pre-internet teenager with limited spending money, I expanded my mind in the audiovisual section of my beloved local library. The hushed media room was a cultural oasis from where I borrowed a well-loved copy of Rio , along with other curiosities and classics: The Velvet Underground & Nico , Kraftwerks Autobahn , Ultravoxs Vienna , The Beatles Yellow Submarine , U2s October , R.E.M.s Chronic Town . At home, I dubbed Rio onto a blank cassette, writing out the album title in bubble letters on the J-card.

I had discovered Duran Duran several years before this, via the gorgeous power ballad Ordinary World and sinewy Come Undone. By then, the band werent the freewheeling vacationers and adventurers of the Rio clip, but the more sophisticated, 1990s version of Duran Duran: ruminative, smartly dressed wedding guests in Ordinary World and the rainbow-haired techno-punks of Too Much Information. In an era where musical reinvention dominatedgrunge demolished rock norms, U2 dabbled in razors-edge irony, David Bowie was an industrial rock godDuran Duran fit right in. They looked and sounded relentlessly modern and effortlessly sleek.

Rio s chic futurism also resonated with me deeply. I romanticized the album as part and parcel of the bewitching 1980s music era. Mired in khaki-boring suburban Ohio, the melodramatic darkness of Duran Duran and their peersother personal favorites included the Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen, the Human League, and the Thompson Twinssounded novel and fresh. Aggressive modern rock bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam understood my angstbut I also desperately wanted to feel and be perceived as cool, and these moodier British bands gave me exactly that feeling.

Where Duran Duran were concerned, I was certainly familiar with Rio s singlesHungry Like The Wolf and the title track, Rio, might as well have been retro alternative radio standardsand the melancholic Save A Prayer connected with my romance-bereft teenage heart. But Rio s album tracks dug their claws in with subtlety: the way Rio ends and My Own Way immediately begins with a satisfying bass curlicue, or the presence of otherworldly synths hovering in New Religion, or how much fun it is to harmonize with vocalist Simon Le Bon on Lonely In Your Nightmare. I vividly remember being in the orchestra pit at my high schoolI was a flautist for the drama clubs production of My Fair Lady listening to Rio on my Walkman and feeling transported away from that dark, dusty space.

Today, I cringe a little at how awkward and goofy I must have been, mooning over a version of England and the 1980s that was certainly much different than reality. But decades after my musical discovery, this period has stuck with me well into adulthood. Plenty of 1980s albums had a couple of amazing singles sprinkled between a lot of generic, forgotten filler. (Thanks to cassettes being dirt-cheap in the 1990s, I learned this lesson early.) But time has been exceptionally kind to Rio . Although released in 1982, it doesnt feel like a musical relic preserved in amber but an album that even now continues to give up sonic Easter eggs. More than that, Rio feels like a complete, cohesive statementa cultural-shifting sonic universe akin to 1980s blockbusters such as Princes Purple Rain , Madonnas Like a Virgin , Michael Jacksons Thriller , and Bruce Springsteens Born in the U.S.A .

Back then, I wouldve been roundly shamed and ridiculed for saying that. Duran Durans mainstream press coverage in the early 1980s was skeptical, dismissive, and occasionally quite mean. Part of that was because teenage girls worshipped the bandand few things are more maligned and diminished than the tastes of teenage girls. Pop music also wasnt taken seriously as an artistic endeavor; it was seen as calculated, manufactured product with vapid messaging. Although Duran Duran had some press and radio champions, the band were often perceived as one-dimensional pop stars: all style, no substance. In the eyes of detractors, the members of Duran Duran couldnt be both handsome and talented; their songs couldnt be commercially oriented and also innovative; the band couldnt be ambitious and artsy.

Yet the truth was binaries never suited Duran Duran; neither did narrow pigeonholing. They werent a synth-pop band; they werent exactly new wave; they split the difference between pure pop and straightforward rock. New Romantics? Yes, the band had dalliances with ruffled shirts and swashbuckling fashion, but that tag didnt really fit either beyond a certain point. Because they hailed from Birmingham, England, and were initially away from Londons hype and glare, Duran Duran were free to create their own approach to the sounds and styles of the day.

The Rio -era lineup coalesced in mid-1980. Their first big hit, Planet Earth, came less than a year later. By the end of 1982, Duran Duran were all over MTV and, shortly thereafter, radio and magazines. In 1983, the band became a true phenomenon: Duran Duran had four US Top 20 singles, with three reaching the top 5, and had multiple music videos making waves. This incredible rise came about due to visual innovation paired with impeccable songwriting, a music culture ready for fresher sounds, and ferocious self-confidence. Duran Duran didnt need to wait around for a career to happen; they had the audacity to believe they could manifest their own success.