Are Duran Duran “Officially Cool At Last”?
When were Duran Duran cool? Circa Rio? Seven And The Ragged Tiger? Perfect Teeth? Donnie Darko? Reuters suggests that appreciative remarks from bands like the Killers have made the group “officially cool at last.” In 2008. So that’s what it takes to be cool? A tip of the hat from Brandon Flowers? Did “Tranquilize” make Lou Reed more cool? Or is Lou Reed so much cooler than the Killers or Duran Duran that working with the Killers made Lou less cool. And where does Timbaland fit into all this? Or, for that matter, the Dandy Warhols?
Pop stars Duran Duran, who shot to fame for a string of smash hits and dodgy suits in the 1980s, are officially cool at last.
Once panned for being pretty boys who used enough hairspray to blow a hole in the ozone layer, the British band have become a reference point for many of today’s chart-topping acts, such as indie rockers Arctic Monkeys and American outfit The Killers.
“It’s the greatest form of flattery,” Duran Duran drummer Roger Taylor told Reuters in an interview before a sell-out Tokyo show earlier this week.
“Sometimes the music press try to write us out of music history a little bit, so it’s been really cool that bands have actually said we were a good band, and they were good songs and they want to be a little bit like us and take something from Duran Duran.”
While videos of them on yachts wearing silk suits might be painful to watch now, over 100,000 Internet pages are devoted to Duran Duran, who have sold more than 90 million albums.
Actually, the video for “Rio” is probably the least painful thing about Duran Duran, and I’d really like to see how many of those hundred thousand pages a) are devoted to Duran Duran and b) have been updated since Medazzaland. You mean to tell me that one out of every three people that bought Pop Trash made a Web site about it? If so, I’d say they were officially cool then.
Wild boys Duran Duran cool at last [Reuters]
