YMMV / Duran Duran

• Alternative Character Interpretation: "Save a Prayer" - "You saw me standing by the old corner of main street, and the lights are flashing on your windowsill. All alone ain't much fun so you're looking for the thrill." Anyone else think the song is from the perspective of a hooker?
• Audience-Alienating Era: Notorious was when many fans thought they'd overstayed their welcome. Others believe that the album that preceded it, Seven and the Ragged Tiger, was the start of their downfall, due to it being produced by the divisive Nile Rodgers.
• Awesome Art: Patrick Nagel's iconic painting on the cover of Rio. It's a gorgeous album cover with sleek graphics.
• Awesome Music: Lots, but Rio and their Self-Titled Album stand out, with their catchy riffs, smooth vocals and snazzy guitar work.
• Even Better Sequel: While their debut album is well-regarded, their second album Rio is their most popular and well-known album.
• Fan Nickname: The Fab Five.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Many fans ignore the 90's-and-onwards stuff entirely.
• Narm: "Ordinary World" is a beautiful, introspective ballad, and arguably one of the best songs of their career. The issue is not the song itself, but the music video — it depicts the band singing the song to a woman wearing the most ridiculous bridal ensemble in the free world. One of the guitarists even plays with it at one point.
• Narm Charm: Revolutionary for their time though they might have been, their music videos are full of cheesy acting and convoluted plots, but that's exactly why people still love and remember them.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The controversial "Girls on Film" caused quite a stir and Simon Le Bon would later complain that its notoriety had overshadowed the message in his lyrics- the song is actually a rather scathing deconstruction of the objectification of women in media- one possible interpretation of the lyrics is that it's about the death of a starlet at the hands of a Stalker with a Crush and a camera.
• Refrain from Assuming: No its not "Dance into the Fire", its "A View to a Kill", just like the Bond movie it's attached to.
• Seasonal Rot: Since their mid-eighties hiatus they've demonstrated an uncanny ability to follow up their most successful albums with a string of disappointing ones.
  • The first post-hiatus release, Notorious, did fairly well, but Big Thing and Liberty were mediocre at best.
  • The next release, The Wedding Album, was a big hit, but Thank You, Medazzaland and Pop Trash ranged from So Okay, It's Average to just plain awful.
  • When the original five members got back together for the first time in twenty years they had another success with Astronaut, but they followed it up with the less successful Red Carpet Massacre.
• Song Association: "Wild Boys" is well-known as walk-in music for Mirko "Cro Cop" Filipovic. He used it for most of the fights in his career, so it's not difficult to find comments under YouTube videos with this song remembering this fact.
• Spiritual Successor: Many analysts likened the band to the '80s equivalent of Roxy Music, especially as they were after the departure of Brian Eno, thanks to both groups' suave images and knack for sexually charged songs. This is fitting, as one of Duran Duran's influences, Japan, were previously compared to Eno-era Roxy Music.
• Tear Jerker: "Save a Prayer" and "Out of My Mind" are heart-wrenching songs about bad relationships. "Ordinary World" is about loss in general, while "Come Undone" is a heart-breaking song about a marriage turned sour. "Someone Else Not Me" cuts too, as it's about accepting that someone you romantically love is choosing someone else, and that it's okay to wish for their happiness while still being broken about it.
• Vindicated by History: "Serious" was their lowest charting single up to that point, performing so poorly that a proposed third single was shelved the day before shooting began for the video. Today most fans consider it an ignored classic and one of the main reasons Liberty manages to avoid Fanon Discontinuity.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: In the early 1980s, millions of preteen and teenage girls were greatly moved as they sat by their record players and listened to the band's hit single "Save a Prayer", and when they saw Duran Duran perform said song live they flicked their Bic lighters on and swayed to and fro. All of this raw emotion was for a song singing the joys of one-night stands. It doesn't help that the song sounds like a beautiful melancholy "break up song"-type ballad (even if it does mention "a one-night stand") and the band's lyrics tend to be varying degrees of "word salady". It sounds like a beautiful, loving, romantic, sensitive ode to a one-night stand... or something.

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