Duran Duran's Rio: The Hunger For Alchemickal Union And Early Pursuit Of Transfeminine Nonbinary Identity

Texas (1983) by Patrick Nagel 

The first LP i purchased was the Raiders Of The Lost Ark soundtrack, but the first cassette i purchased was Duran Duran's Seven And The Ragged Tiger, which is a wonderfully cryptic album, but not quite their greatest work. Their greatest album was and is Rio, at least for me (despite my personal feelings that the Wild Boys video is their most powerful moment). That was the second (or third?) cassette I ever purchased. I was and am a huge Duran Duran fan, to the point of having Duran Duran posters in my tween bedroom, much to the delight of my older cousin, who was the sort of Duran Duran fan who had a Major Crush on Simon Le Bon and who would regale me on a daily basis with Tiger Beat Facts about the likes and dislikes and biographical data of members of Duran Duran. While it is true that Simon Le Bon and the Taylors and Non-Taylors (heart Nick Rhodes!) of Duran Duran were and are cute, that was not my interest in Duran Duran. What I liked about them was their opacity, their fusion of art-rock impenetrability to whatever concentrated development arose from their purported fusion of the Sex Pistols and Chic. I loved the glamour and the cinematicism of Duran Duran, the endless deferral of a desire forever unmet. This is where things become really important. Within Rio by Duran Duran, there is a subnarrative about the pursuit of the feminine and a unification with that feminine principle. This was a quest sought out of great longing and frustration and pursued in the same mode. Weirdly, to tween and later me, this never felt like sexual desire, but about something unmanifest or missing within. I would have dreams about girls dancing to Rio and I always thought that one day we would me, but not to kiss. The girl was the girl living within me, alive and distant. In Rio, the feminine is a destination, a place, a river bringing life to a dusty land on its way to the ocean, someone to be uncovered, to shine and reveal itself in its brilliance only after being sought and found and met on its own terms. Meaning so much to me like a Birthday. Knowing over Understanding. This is an alchemical relationship, a Chemical Wedding. Self-determination, High Fashion, Disco Strings. The performativity of desire, layers of artifice which were more true than what truth could be shallowly represented as. The transition from the first Duran Duran album to Rio is the transition from New Wave Disco to New Romanticism Synth Rock, an airy open sound which embraces flatness and negative space only to flood them with saxophone or guitar solo. The feeling of being trapped in a dream which needs to experience rupture in order to undergo elemental change is an overpowering one. To be singular, to be occult and hidden, to have made a protected magick circle within oneself to survive oneself but which cannot remain without transformation and (re)union. The hunger in 'Hungry Like The Wolf' is ultimately this sort of hunger, a universe unbalanced with desire, seeking the lost aspects of itself, of heat, of aliveness, an end to lostness, to fragmentary being. It is a joyous chase, a ritualized one, which ends not in death, but in union and rebirth. I never identified with Simon Le Bon's neocolonial suit, nor did I identify with the purported object of his affections, what I DID identify with is the frustration of the quest, the hunger itself, the all-consuming discord. This night I had a dream, and it was a dream about the overturned table in the 'Hungry Like The Wolf' video, and i realized that that freeze-framed overturned table was the dialectical slash, which separates and enjoins the male and the female in this alchemical gender quest narrative, that I identify with that table, frozen, /, like so, which divides and mediates and transforms, a barrier yet also a gate to pass through. This video, like the video for 'Rio' and other Duran Duran song/image texts, trafficks in a symbolist version of feminine imagery which would have been essentialist, imperialist, racist and uselessly binary in the 19th Century, yet also serves as the uncovering of those binary divisions and ultimately the possibility of their undoing. 8-12 year old me felt intuitively all of this was less about female experience and more about policed masculinity, the limits of gender, and how that could ultimately be dissolved. The hunger in 'Hungry Like The Wolf' was the hunger for the dissolution of these categories and barriers. It was rad that Duran Duran could wear makeup and scarves, but like Motely Crue or Poison, they ultimately reinforced a gender binary in what was desired and what was desired for the self. This is why Duran Duran's underground river of alchemical remaking was so important. Here a subtext repeatedly overcame manifest content, to ultimately blot out in Seven And The Ragged Tiger. It is worth noting, also, that 'Hungry Like The Wolf', in video form, is also a werewolf story, that the pursuit and encounter with the sought alters one ultimately through sacrificial violence and surrender to becoming. Fire left to its own devices will overcome and extinguish itself, but rain will also extinguish fire. The union of fire and water must be accomplished via magickal means. The prospect of a new way of being, of knowing, is fleetingly present all over and within Rio. Missed connections, near-misses, flirting with elemental forces which cannot be domesticated nor reduced to the level of human experience. Purposefully delayed salvation, which would be an end to the seeking, a choice made to remain in indeterminate states, in confusion and unknowing, but suffused with desire and with want, without resolution. At the end of Rio, union is not achieved, although togetherness is, but a togetherness riven by unspoken need and nearly unbridgeable chasms. I wanted to wear the dresses at sunset, where the shadows would increase, to want and to be wanted, a sustained ache irresolvable in all of the terms knowable to us at the time. It is not coincidental that the very next musick I would become obsessed with was Prince, who, while addressing this ache and hunger, was both more explicitly sexual and more explicitly at war with gender division and convention, especially in the first half of the 1980's.
My own efforts to overcome gender binary lived deep within me, underground until the very late 1980's and early 1990's, flourished for a time and then retreated again underground until now. I have Duran Duran to thank for keeping me company early on, to helping me see, to know without understanding. Hail. <3 nathaxn