I am really starting to get sick of these insinuations that not liking
Paper Gods is tantamount to being a stuck in the mud old fart! Please understand, I LOVE modern music. I LOVE it when bands keep moving forward and incorporate new sounds and influences into what they are doing. Stagnating bands that try to write the same album over and over again bore the shit out of me. I have no use for that nonsense. That said,
Paper Gods has
NOTHING to do with duran duran being influenced by modern music or constantly evolving. It is a blatant attempt to woo younger audiences by latching on to popular tabloid icons, top 40 dance stars, and hip genre locked producers with a built-in audience of millennials.
What
Paper Gods actually is, is more like if in 1988 duran duran, instead of releasing
Big Thing as we know it, had gotten
Whitney Houston and
Rick Astley to guest star on an album with production by
Stock, Aitken & Waterman as a reaction to
Skin Trade and
Meet El Presidente failing to make the TOP 20 and lower sales of the
Notorious album versus the first four albums (I include
Arena here).
Understand, I love modern music, but modern music isn't limited to TOP 40 junk electro dance pop. One of my current favourite bands (Imagine Dragons) had their first major label release in 2012. Would I like to hear the Imagine Dragons guest on a duran duran album? F
U
C
K No! Do I want duran duran to have
Alex da Kid produce their latest album? Not really. Would I like it if duran duran incorporated some distortion synths into their songs like the ones found in Radioactive? That would be pretty cool and I would probably find it enjoyable. In fact, the only thing I really like about
The Universe Alone is the distortion heavy ending.
If you want to talk about my parents, I'll clue you in to what they sounded like. I remember as a little kid my parents saying duran duran was
"very nice" until
The Union of the Snake was released as a single. To which they said it was
"too violent". Considering that songs are made of sound waves essentially, I cannot imagine how one could even be
"too violent" unless it somehow was able to cause havoc and bring down buildings even at low volumes. Regardless, I have never and will never find any music to be too violent. There is a lot of it that I consider boring, poorly written, or simply lacking any artistry whatsoever, but that has been pretty much the same since I was a child.
I dislike Paper Gods because it is a terrible album saddled with hip Top 40 dance icons and producers who make what I consider to be monotone dance music that has little to do with duran duran, modern or classic. The music is low rent electronica with some craptastic 90s techno thrown into the mix (mess). Even though I tend not to prioritize lyrics, I also find them mostly to be trite and uninspired. The best lyrics, unsurprisingly, are to be found on what I consider the best song,
You Kill Me With Silence. On another thread someone said that the album seemed inspired by the VMAs and even though I wouldn't watch that trash, I completely understand not only how that is possible, but likely.
If you check back a few years to my first posts on this forum you will see that I had some criticism over
All You Need Is Now that mostly centred around the fact that I felt the album was trying too hard to sound like
RIO. In particular, I find the signature keyboard sound that flows throughout
Runway Runaway to be particularly troublesome from a self-copying point of view. It isn't the only example, but it is probably the most glaring. That said, my final opinion on
All You Need Is Now is actually high praise, not for the stuff that hearkens back to
RIO, but rather songs like the title track and
Other People's Lives that pushed the boundaries of what duran duran has done and where they
are WERE going as band. Clearly they have abandon such lofty concepts to once again go bandwagon jumping, as they were asked to do by SONY after
Repotage was rejected. We can all agree that
Red Carpet Massacre wasn't their best effort. The songs on this album most remind me of
Skin Divers &
Nite Runner which were the two songs I disliked most off that album. As far as I am concerned,
All You Need Is Now was a return to form and easily their best effort since
Pop Trash.
So a big
` f
u
c
k
i
n
g
` YES to this album being a disappointment and a big
F U C K` YOU to anyone who thinks that signifies close-mindedness to innovation and incorporating modern sounds and influences. Not liking crappy drivel that happens to be popular with many young people does not signify having an old timers mentality. There is plenty of
f
u
c
k
i
n
g
awesome new music that a shitload of under 20s know & love; Kiesza, Mr Hudson, Lindsay Lohan, and Janelle Monáe have nothing to do with the great modern music that I and many people quite a bit younger than me love. I am sorry that you are so stuck in your ways that the only valid modern music you believe to exist is this VMA style Top 40 nonsense. I for one still prefer to seek out fresh music than have it spoonfed to me by people with questionable taste. I am saddened that duran duran have chosen to go down the spoonfed route, but I feel fairly confident that this album will not bring them the adulation they seek and we will soon have another
Red Carpet Massacre style backlash on our hands.