What A Girl Wants

Mixtape maven Rob Sheffield lets us in on the conversation of his lifetime in Talking to Girls About Duran Duran

By Sarah Grant
Published: July 21st, 2010 | 2:55pm

After the death of Elvis Presley, Lester Bangs said, “I can guarantee you on one thing—we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis."

Bangs died in 1982, unable to predict that the same year, a new breed of she-wolves born under discord and rhyme would take over planet Earth. Rob Sheffield was a teenage boy in Boston. Talking to girls about Duran Duran was not what one did, he explains, it was how one survived.

Thirty years later, “Union of the Snake” is still on Sheffield’s heavy rotation. How did this happen? In his clever new book, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut, Sheffield backstrokes through a sea of AquaNet to find the answer to where all music begins: with girls.

Sheffield holds the door of his DeLorean for all types of girls: barracudas and maneaters, China girls, "sk8r" girls, small town girls, and even a rocket queen. The book is organized as one '80s mix tape. Each chapter is a charmingly written parable devoted to the new wave girl who taught him how to listen to the song, how to love the song, and how to clap along if the song happens to be “Private Eyes.”

In one chapter, Sheffield quotes Oscar Wilde: “Give me a mask and I’ll tell you the truth.” Sheffield’s mask is the 1980s. He is Anthony Michael Hall pumping “Purple Rain” in an ice cream truck, a college squeeze pouting like John Taylor, and a husband putting it out like Sheena Easton.

Sheffield writes most evocatively as Bananarama’s “Shy Boy”: an observant brother who understands the world through the way his sisters think and interact. The chapter titled “No More Lonely Nights,’ by Paul McCartney” thoughtfully portrays the “prettiest” Beatle through the example of his younger sister Ann. Like Paul, “Ann is a take-charge gal… the one you’d call from a Turkish prison to explain you’d be late for dinner.” She guided him through essential girl rules. “They really like the toilet paper to be on the little rolling thing.” “They do?” “Yes. We do.”

Talking to Girls About Duran Duran is a book that tries to make sense of nostalgia. This is an apt task considering the way today’s social media has us in constant contact with our home peeps, thus accelerating our innate need to be sentimental about the past. The only people not nostalgic in Sheffield’s book are the girls: the strong-shouldered women, the new wavers, the Madonnas in lacy gloves that saw him through the smoky air of his youth into the karaoke bars of his adulthood.

Girls change the music. Once it starts they never wanna stop. Sheffield has no idea why it works this way, but like Simon, Nick, John, Roger, and Andy, Sheffield is happy to keep singing and screaming along to “Hungry Like the Wolf” until the girls agree on what comes next.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man’s Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut

by Rob Sheffield

Penguin, July 2010

222 pages, $25.95