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COVER STORY

Talking to Girls About Duran Duran by Rob Sheffield

For When: You're hungry like the wolf


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Published: Jun 16, 2010

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Many love letters have been written to the late, great '80s: in film, The Wedding Singer; on TV, I Love the '80s; on the streets, flashback fashion; and in music, countless cover and tribute bands doing their best Axl lizard wiggle or Billy Idol snarl on dive bar stages across the country.

Rob Sheffield has added his name to that list with Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut. That's not to say that his collection of essays, each centered around one song, one year and one event in his coming-of-age, should be lost in the clutter.

As in his first book, Love Is a Mix Tape, Sheffield is a charming, bumbling nerd who exists solely for music and pop culture. In this latest effort he's more polished and better able to zero in on a genre, an emotion, a decade. Much like the '80s, this book is chock-full of pure, guilty-pleasure cheese (see: chapter on Prince). There are gender-bending existential trials (David Bowie, of course). But it's the section on Madonna, girls and Irish Catholics where Sheffield's writing is deeply introspective and thoughtful, not just entertaining. Music is, after all, the author's religion, and why shouldn't it be? It's a beautiful relationship, and he wants to share it. So he wrote us this book of psalms.

Dutton, 222 pp., $25.95, July 15

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