{"id":1149,"date":"2017-07-09T06:41:59","date_gmt":"2017-07-09T14:41:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/?p=1149"},"modified":"2023-03-05T07:11:21","modified_gmt":"2023-03-05T15:11:21","slug":"duran-duran-perfect-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/duran-duran-perfect-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Duranalysis: Perfect Day"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cPerfect Day,\u201d Duran Duran\u2019s immaculate version of the 1972 Lou Reed classic, appeared on\u00a0Thank You<\/em>, their 1995 album of covers. While\u00a0Thank You<\/em>\u00a0was critically savaged upon release (Rolling Stone<\/em>\u00a0called it \u201cstunningly wrongheaded\u201d; the\u00a0Irish Times\u00a0<\/em>dubbed it \u201cthe single worst album in the history of recorded music<\/a>\u201d), \u201cPerfect Day\u201d escaped the carnage relatively unscathed:\u00a0Metro Weekly\u00a0<\/em>called it \u201cfar and away the best thing on the album<\/a>,\u201d while Reed himself referred to it as \u201cthe best cover version ever completed\u00a0of\u00a0one of my songs<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0Duran Duran pulled off a beautiful, bittersweet rendition of a beautiful, bittersweet song.

The accompanying music video is the work of Nick Egan, who, over the past couple of decades, has essentially replaced Russell Mulcahy as the band\u2019s default director of choice\u2014in addition to \u201cPerfect Day,\u201d he\u2019s also helmed the videos for \u201cOrdinary<\/a> World<\/a>,\u201d \u201cWhite Lines,\u201d \u201cAll You Need Is Now,\u201d and \u201cPressure Off<\/a>.\u201d Egan does excellent work; all those aforementioned videos are beautifully shot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From a narrative standpoint, however\u2026 Egan is a gifted artist, not a storyteller. Of his videos for Duran Duran, \u201cOrdinary World\u201d comes the closest to having a storyline, and that storyline is \u201ca bride strolls around a garden on a sunny day.\u201d Mostly, his videos feature meticulously-composed footage of the band members performing while looking very, very lovely. It\u2019s all very\u00a0nice<\/em>, but I miss the deliriously chaotic throw-everything-at-the-wall approach of their early, narrative-driven videos. Granted, my affections are both fickle and shallow, but if it doesn\u2019t feature the band members\u00a0battling mutants in a post-apocalyptic wasteland<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0murdering each other on the Eiffel Towe<\/a>r, it\u2019s probably not going to win my heart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nonetheless, Egan and the boys turned out a lovely video for \u201cPerfect Day,\u201d capturing the ethereal, melancholy feeling of the song via a series of gorgeous images. Let\u2019s hit it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The video takes place entirely on a small, boxy stage, which is painted a rich, saturated red. The film is slightly overexposed, giving everything a fuzzy glow. The mood is languid and hazy: Simon bobs and sways gently to the music like a hula dancer on Klonopin, while the remaining band members remain almost motionless.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Duran<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Egan shoots the Durans so they all look ravishing and luminous, nothing but sparkly eyes and translucent skin. Look at our boy Simon here, who appears unsettlingly lovely and unnatural, like he\u2019s taken up residence in the uncanny valley. He looks like a character in a video game, or maybe a hyper-realistic Japanese sex doll.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Duran<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\u2026yeah, I was investigating whether there\u2019s a more formal name for \u201cJapanese sex doll,\u201d and I forgot to open a browser window in incognito mode before Googling that phrase, so my targeted online ads are going to be pretty interesting for a while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The band members look lithe and glamorous in their sleek satin suits. They\u2019re also all padding around the stage barefoot, so, y\u2019know, if the Venn diagram of your favorite things in life features both \u201cDuran Duran\u201d and \u201cfoot fetishism,\u201d this video falls neatly into the overlapping space.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Duran<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

John, wraithlike and somber in funereal white, spends much of the video skulking about. He slumps against the wall clutching his bass; he slithers around the floor on all fours. At one point, he slouches in a chair, his expression reflecting the bleakly nihilistic void of his soul as blood trickles down the camera lens; I\u2019m not 100% clear on his character arc here, but I\u2019m guessing it\u2019s not \u201cJohn is having a super fun time and is perfectly content with his life at this moment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Duran<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Even while suffering from a quiet existential crisis, the man sure does photograph beautifully.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Duran<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Yo! Roger Taylor! How lovely and unexpected to see you here, sir! This is 1995, remember, a decade after Roger quit the band to live in peaceful obscurity and a good half-dozen years before he\u2019d return to the fold, so his appearance in this video is a delightful surprise. Duran Duran has weathered a few lineup changes over the decades, and while the rotating string of guitarists\u2014Andy to Warren to Andy Part Deux to Dom\u2014has mostly served to inject a fun element of unpredictability, it never seems quite right to see anyone but Roger perched behind the drum kit.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Duran<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Speaking of Warren\u2026 There he is, sitting cross-legged on the floor, playing\u00a0a sitar\u00a0and getting his Ravi Shankar on. This arrangement of \u201cPerfect Day,\u201d by the way, is an aural joy, with complex layers of lush instrumentals supporting Simon\u2019s wistful vocals. (Here\u2019s Lou Reed talking about the song on\u00a0the Duran-themed episode of\u00a0Behind the Music<\/em>: \u201cI\u2019m not sure that I sang as well as Simon sang it. I think he sings it better than I. If I could\u2019ve sung it the way he did, I would\u2019ve. It wasn\u2019t from lack of trying.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Ah, here\u2019s the preternaturally elegant Nick Rhodes. He\u2019s plunking away at a doll-sized keyboard, which, in keeping with the minimalist staging, looks like he found it inside a cereal box. Nick is that rare creature who can make dressing from head to toe in shiny pink satin look like a good idea.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Duran<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

You can put the mirror away, Nick. You know you\u2019re flawless.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Duran<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

All this hazy, languid tranquility is interspersed with blipverts of unsettling images: time-lapse footage of roses blooming and dying, sketches of skeletons adorned with flowers, military helicopters, atomic bombs. It all speaks to the greater point of the song: \u201cPerfect Day\u201d is not to be taken at face value, blissful lyrics about drinking sangria in the park and feeding animals in the zoo notwithstanding. The subtext of \u201cPerfect Day\u201d involves heroin addiction, a connection that would become explicit in 1996, when Reed\u2019s original version popped up on the\u00a0Trainspotting<\/em>\u00a0soundtrack. As\u00a0a 1997 piece in\u00a0The Independent<\/em><\/a> put it, \u201c\u2018Perfect Day\u2019 is not about heroin because it was used in\u00a0Trainspotting<\/em>. The song was used in\u00a0Trainspotting<\/em>\u00a0because it is about heroin.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Duran<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

(As is often the case when analyzing music lyrics, there\u2019s no critical consensus on this interpretation.\u00a0A separate article in\u00a0The Independent,<\/em><\/a>\u00a0posted three weeks after the first one, makes an argument for taking the lyrics of \u201cPerfect Day\u201d literally: \u201cIf Lou Reed wanted to write a song about heroin, he did\u2014and called it \u2018Heroin.\u2019\u201d The piece goes on to refer to the Duran Duran cover as both a \u201cfuturistic nightmare\u201d and\u00a0an \u201cheroic failure,\u201d so make of that what you will.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ll give\u00a0the final word on interpretation<\/a>\u00a0to Simon: \u201cI imagined I was singing it to my daughter Amber, and suddenly the song became mine. It\u2019s such a beautiful song, it doesn\u2019t have to be about heroin.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Duran<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Fair enough, Simon, and well done, Duran Duran. You knocked this one out of the park.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cPerfect Day,\u201d Duran Duran\u2019s immaculate version of the 1972 Lou Reed classic, appeared on\u00a0Thank You, their 1995 album of covers. While\u00a0Thank You\u00a0was critically savaged upon release (Rolling Stone\u00a0called […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1150,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-duran-duran"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1149"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1521,"href":"https:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149\/revisions\/1521"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}