Hey now, wooo! Look at that! It’s a full-on ass crack from one of the Duran Duran guys1, right there smack in the middle of the screen in the video to “Rio.” All these years I guess I’ve been too distracted by the model winking at me to notice how deliberately that shot was composed, and now I feel foolish.
Other things I didn’t really remember or fully appreciate: how much of the video is the guys doing slapstick, and how much of the song is Nick Rhodes2 going nuts on the keyboard. I hope he was using an arpeggiator, or the poor guy must’ve been exhausted by the end of it!
The keyboards are such a big part of the sound of “Rio” (and also “Hungry Like the Wolf,” where they’re a little bit more prominent) that it seems odd that I’m only really noticing them now. But in my defense: 1) I can’t overstate how ubiquitous this album was at the time, and it gradually just became like background noise; and 2) I was more distracted by how much the video was stressing how heterosexual these guys were by having them cavort with supermodels, vs how not-heterosexual the video made me feel overall.3
It was also reminding me of another song that I couldn’t quite place. Eventually, after several fruitless Google searches for “pop songs with arpeggiators” I suddenly remembered it was “There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)” by Eurythmics. I’ve always been conflicted by that song, because there’s so much of it I 1000% genuinely, unreservedly love, like how Annie Lennox manages to stretch the word “bliss” across like a dozen syllables, and how the video says “what the hell, it’s the 80s, let’s just put everybody in drag,” and how it somehow still feels timeless despite the cheesy drum pads.
But I hate the harmonica solo, and I always hate harmonica solos, even when they’re by Stevie Wonder. I do genuinely wonder whether it has the same connotation for other people that it does for me, where it immediately makes me think of lower-budget live action family movies and Hanna Barbera cartoons from the late 1970s, where everything felt brown and cheap and dirty, and was just begging for the 1980s to come in and make everything clean and modern and brightly-colored again. Largely by artists like Duran Duran and the Eurythmics, now that I think of it.