Duran Duran: Seven & The Ragged Tiger : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Duran Duran, it appears, will not be content to have every schoolgirl with cable television scrawling the name Simon Le Bon in her geography notebook for the next two years. Though they have recorded some moderately enthralling pop singles ("Hungry like the Wolf," "Rio," "Girls on Film"), Duran Duran seek weightier ground, a place in the artistic pop pantheon apart from such TV-made teen idols as Ricky Nelson and David Cassidy. Simply put, Duran Duran want to be taken seriously. And viewed in that light, Seven and the Ragged Tiger is nothing short of reprehensible: a haughty, pretentious paean to the joys of new money, an album that rips rock & roll virtues off their moorings and transplants them into Reaganesque contexts.

"Art," to Duran Duran, appears to begin with opacity. In a purely lyrical sense, the nine songs on Seven and the Ragged Tiger are all but uninterpretable, save for some barely perceptible yoga references. Art also means taking the sense of alienation that breathes through so much rock & roll and grafting it onto nouveau riche landscapes. "I sold the Renoir and the TV set," heaves vocalist Le Bon in "The Reflex," and he's not just kidding -- he's also reinforcing the most insistent subtext of the band's videos: these are worldly folk, at home in the realm of the newly well-to-do. But these boys are taking it hard. Check Le Bon's ravings on the angst-ridden "(I'm Looking for) Cracks in the Pavement": "Don't wanna be in public/My head is full of chopstick/I don't like it." Huh?

Worse still is the music, an egregiously mellow funk hybrid inched along by bassist John Taylor and drummer Roger Taylor. Synthmeister Nick Rhodes and company can handle a slow one (the goofy "The Seventh Stranger") but come a cropper when the going gets rougher: botched tempos spoil the Beatlesque middle eight of "Cracks in the Pavement" and derail the attempted AOR offering "Of Crime and Passion," in which Le Bon cries, "I'm talking of crime and passion." Hey, fella, this is rock & roll: if you have to talk about it, you ain't got it.

Admittedly, "Union of the Snake" is an A-1 single, a charging, foot-stomping romp with a suitably astringent sax break. And the harmonized chorus of "New Moon on Monday" provides a moment or two of enjoyment. But the rest of this stuff! It's said that the success of these dance-oriented wimpoids paved the way for the success of the Michael Jacksons and Princes of the world. Even Talking Heads, who have forgotten more about this kind of music than this Anglo pentad will ever know, may have profited commercially from the '82 coup of Duran Duran.

But for teen idols, I'll take Menudo, those fresh-faced Puerto Ricans who sing in Spanish about frogs and swimming pools full of spaghetti. As for Duran Duran, one can only plead no mas, no mas.