Electric Barbarella

This song comes off a little perverse, but in a fun way! Having sex with something like a blowup doll that perhaps looks like Jane Fonda's character Barbarella in the movie by the same name...

Also, didn't the name Duran Duran come from the movie Barbarella?

i think this is just a 'for-fun' song ;) as much as i believe in the obscurity in some of DD's lyrics, this ain't the case, it's just ain't. and note that they were written by the smartest guy in the band, eh. the one obsessed with technology and Barbarella, so it makes sense. but nothing beyond that in my oppinion, and that makes it pretty clear to understand.

zat, yes it did. Dr. Duran Duran was the villian in that film (played by Milo O'Shea)

This ought to sum things up. A very different point of view, but it does make sense. http://www.disenchanted.com/dis/technology/barbarella.html

Not as fun of an approach, but a good explanation, nonetheless. I dont know why, but i'm in love with this song.

This song is so goddamn catchy! Um, yeah it's pretty much about sex...with not-real people...but it's catchy dammit! Love love love the song.

This song would have been more appropriately released on 'Pop Trash' as I think it goes in the ironic category. 'Too Much Information' was an earlier public revelation that the band realized that the culture industry was perverse but also understood it's place in it: "I hate to bight the hand that feeds...". Even earlier (1984) was Simon's insistence that "it will never happen again" as he protested suggestions by the American music presss that they were on par with the first British Invasion by The Beatles. This hysterical commodification of the band drove them to exhaustion, ending the original lineup. (Bob Dylan and Thom Yorke have had more intense documented backlashes to the press.)

So, I'll get on with it. I think the song is about sexual commodification and the spectacle that is the vehicle of the message - it's about the 'Culture Industry' [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry] as coined by Theodore Adorno. The fact that Simon is apparenly getting off with a machine has no consquence as the difference between man/machine is not realized - it doesn't matter. This is seen as an achievement by those selling the product. It is seen as a failure for those searching for nurishment:

"Whether or not we live in a world of simulacra, the term is certainly important in light of how we view media. Media theorists, especially Jean Baudrillard, have been intensely concerned with the concept of the simulation in lieu of its interaction with our notion of the real and the original, revealing in this preoccupation media's identity not as a means of communication, but as a means of representation (the work of art as a reflection of something fundamentally "real"). When media reach a certain advanced state, they integrate themselves into daily "real" experience to such an extent that the unmediated sensation is indistinguishable from the mediated, and the simulation becomes confused with its source. The simulation differs from the image and the icon (and the simulacrum) in the active nature of its representation. What are forged or represented are not likenesses of static entities, but instead the processes of feeling and experiencing themselves. Beginning as a primarily visual representation, the simulacrum (provisionally: the image of a simulation) has since been extended theoretically, and in the recent theory exemplified by the work of Baudrillard functions as a catch-all term for systems still operating despite the loss of what previous meaning they had held."

[http://www.chicagoschoolmediatheory.net/glossary2004/simulationsimulacrum.htm]

wow, i thought it was just a song about technology. but Wow i've seen the bbc channel

If it's about a blow-up doll, it's only appropriate, considering that one of their biggest influences, Roxy Music, also had a song about a sex doll ("In Every Dream Home A Heartache").

first song available to officially buy online EVER

New Duranimal here. Always like the guys music, but recently became a fan. Love this song! Missed it when it 1st came out. So catchy! It's the inspiration for my username. :)