What is the underlying meaning of the song 'Electric Barbarella'?

Question

What's Duran Duran singing about??

Does anyone know, because I'm simply not getting it.

Someone PLEASE tell me it's not some erotic fantasy about a washing machine, lol.

Answer 1

Electric Barbarella simply means "I am all out of love" Started by the Flock of Seagulls, perfected by Duran Duran. Later re-made by Twisted Sister, and Osmonds'. Also, there was a rumor that Barry Manillow, and Britney Spears performed a duet at the Staples Center. No proof on this, but the media has been accurate since we discovered WMD in the Middle East.
This song paints bucolic symbolism of love between two people engaging in asexual love. Or it may plainly mean when a man loves a man, or vice versa. There is a hidden theme behind this. My guess would be a wooden vibrator...

Answer 2

Electric Barbarella

Answer 3

"Electric Barbarella" is a direct tribute to the 1968 Roger Vadim film Barbarella, from which the band took their name.John Taylor and Nick Rhodes formed Duran Duran in Birmingham, England in 1978, naming the band after the villain "Dr. Durand Durand", played by Milo O'Shea in Roger Vadim's science-fiction film Barbarella.

Answer 4

I think the song is about sexual commodification and the spectacle that is the vehicle of the message - it's about the '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."

Answer 5

You need to watch the movie Barbarella, with Jane Fonda. 60's SciFi. Very odd.

Then eat some vegemite.

Don't remember the lyrics to the song.