Published on Jan 22, 2001
First off, let me tell those of you out there who aren’t in the
know all about “Yankee Swaps.” They’re a great way to save money
during the holiday season. They keep you from continually expanding
you’re Christmas list to include every single one of your friends
and friends of friends, and allow you to get rid of unwanted
household items in the process. What you do is this: you grab one
of said unwanted household items, or even an unwanted gift if
either the swap occurs after Christmas, or if you happen to be
Jewish. And so does everyone else in the swap. You then all bring
your “gifts” to someone’s house, draw numbers out of a hat, and
then take turns picking presents and opening them, each person
having the option to trade their gift for any other of the ones
that have been opened previously. It’s loads of fun, and usually a
barrel of laughs, depending on how creative (read: bad) the
presents are.
It is at one of these yankee swaps this past December that I
happened upon Duran Duran’s now-infamous (at least among those who
participated)
Thank You album. Now being the music geek that I am, I had
to admit that I in fact had heard of this album before I opened up
the innocent looking green bag that held it. I knew full well that
in 1995, riding on the heels of their recent comeback, the lads
from good old Double D looked at their rather precarious position
upon the charts once again, and here’s what they faced: having been
unable to write any new material of their own since that
illustrious comeback (well, that’s not totally accurate, but we’ll
get to that soon enough) they decided to release… (drumroll
please) an entire album of covers! Evidently they reasoned that the
world loved them again, so it didn’t really matter what they did
next.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I actually like early Duran
Duran, “early” meaning their spotty-but-promising 1981 debut, their
1982 new wave romantic classic
Rio, and the down-to-earth, hit-laden
Seven And The Ragged Tiger from 1983. No, they were no
Beatles, but as post-punk ’80s romantic Brit-pop with bad hair and
lyrics that made no apparent sense, they held their own. But by
1995, comeback or no comeback, the novelty had long since worn off.
Other than the overrated (but still admittedly OK) comeback hits
“Come Undone” and “Ordinary World,” they really hadn’t had any
ideas worth recording since 1983 (and yes, that includes
“Notorious”).
And why hadn’t they? Because they tried to get serious. Duran
Duran is not supposed to be taken seriously. And that’s just fine
and good when they sing stuff like “The union of the snake is on
the climb,” “You’re about as easy as a nuclear war,” and “there’s a
fine line drawing my senses together and I think it’s about to
break,” it’s all par for the course. But when a group that thrives
on meaninglessness tries to get meaningful, that’s just a recipe
for disaster. So in 1995, when I first heard that Duran Duran were
doing a cover album to pay tribute to all their heroes who
influenced them, and covering mostly serious songs to boot,
well… I ran away. And stayed away for five years, until this
most amusing of yankee swaps allowed this monstrosity to catch up
with me.
With great trepidation, I popped the cassette into my Saturn’s
stereo on the way home, and I was greeted with a completely
soul-less cover of Grandmaster Flash’s anti-drug rap classic “White
Lines (Don’t Do It).” Huh? How, in any way, is this song connected
to Duran Duran? It may, perhaps, be connected to the late ’80s
mistakes otherwise known as
Big Thing and
Liberty that this band recorded under the
ever-so-slightly-altered name “Duranduran,” attempting to grasp
onto a musical scene that was slipping away from new wave and into
hip-hop, but who in their right mind (Duran Duran included) would
want to relive that?
Simon LeBon sounds thoroughly unconvincing, and thoroughly white
(OK, so he can’t control that part, but somehow the phrases “Simon
LeBon” and “urban rage” just don’t mix, catch my drift?), on both
this and the second track, a rehash of Sly and the Family Stone’s
“I Want To Take You Higher.” The latter is almost comical when it
degenerates into a supposedly-sexy British woman’s voice asking
“Where do you guys want to take me?” and a reply of “HIGHER!” (gee,
and I was in suspense) from the five DD lads who suddenly sound
like repressed 17-year-olds. Sly’s original version was all about
subtlety. Well, pooh on bloody subtlety, say Simon, Nick and
company, we’re Duran Duran.
The real funny thing is that not only do they get this wrong,
but they also mangle Elvis Costello’s “Watching The Detectives” in
just the opposite way, turning a jagged-edged angry reggae-ska rant
into a majestic electronica ballad. If you’re scared now, you ought
to be. But wait, Bob Dylan’s “Lay, Lady Lay” comes next and once
again there is no connection to the spirit of the original. The
Durannies have mistaken the low-key approach Dylan took on his
“Nashville Skyline” as distance and disinterest. Or perhaps they’re
not even interested themselves.
In fact, on their extreme botching of the Temptations’ “Ball Of
Confusion,” they are disinterested to the point of singing “That’s
what you’re world is today” instead of “That’s what the world is
today.” Or perhaps they didn’t bother to check the original lyric
sheet. Or perhaps it’s appropriate. After all, the world the
Temptations originally sang about was far, far removed from ’90s
Duran Duran’s world, where humanity is sucked up into a vacuum of
uninspired singing, machine-like drumming, and lackluster
electronic noises that summarize perfectly the negative side of the
decade recently past, musically speaking.
OK, so you think this is being overly cruel? Well, I will say
that the Doors’ “Crystal Ship” is the one song on this album that
in fact does make sense for Duran Duran to cover. Jim Morrison, as
we all know, was occasionally prone to disposable but irresistible
pop filled with irrelevant preaching masquerading as romanticism,
much like Duran Duran in their heyday, and this track from the
Doors’ first album is one that wouldn’t sound out of place on
Seven And The Ragged Tiger.
But that’s about all the praise I can muster up today. We
haven’t even yet touched upon the absolute low point of this album.
Yes, folks, “Drive By,” the one quasi-original tune (but wait,
wasn’t this supposed to be an album of covers? Leave it to Duran
Duran to lose interest even in their own uninteresting experiment)
of
Thank You comes second to last, and is straight out of a new
wave “Spinal Tap.” An atmospheric (read: boring) wash of
synthesizers introduces us to the following poetic mumbo jumbo:
“It was the hottest day in July / and all along the Santa Monica
Boulevard, the cars were stood still / and a gleaming metal tube
that stretched all the way from high land back to La Brea /
shimmered under the Los Angeles sunshine / The young man was
sitting at the wheel on his way to make a pickup / Turned off the
AC, rolled down the window and began to sweat / All over the
Hollywood hills, he saw the clouds building like great dark towers
of rain / ready to come tumbling down any day now / not a day too
soon / and as the music drifted in from other cars / his eyes
started to slip / this is the story of his dream.”
So now there’s supposed to be a story, right? Well, what happens
is this: The wash of synthesizers then segues into a lame reprise
of the “Sing blue silver” chorus of “The Chauffeur,” the most
indulgent attempt at musical respect from their early days (It’s
almost as if Duran Duran realize that this is the only pre-1984
song of theirs that has any connection to their current
incarnation). And that’s it. That’s the story of his dream.
“Where’s the actual story?” you might ask. Who knows?
All I know is after this, and after the eagerly-awaited
conclusion to this album, a second attempt at “I Want To Take You
Higher” – that’s right, they were so hard up for songs to cover
that they had to cover themselves and then cover the same song
twice – I played my
Rio disc ASAP and breathed a sigh of relief. And that, my
friends, should speak for itself.
The album cover is cool at least. It’s a silver-tinged scrapbook
of the musical heroes of Duran Duran, the original performers of
these songs, who are now turning in their beds (or graves). Oh, and
you may notice I didn’t give Duran Duran the satisfaction of
bringing even negative attention to their version of Led Zeppelin’s
“Thank You,” from which the name of this poor excuse for an album
hails. Some things are just plain sacred. Enough already.
This disc is saved from the dreaded “F” only because of “Crystal
Ship.”