With MTV officially shuttered in 2026, Duran Duran’s San Diego stop felt like a living counterargument to the idea that pop relevance expires with its platforms. At Viejas Arena, the band delivered a kinetic, visually rich performance that affirmed their status not as relics of the MTV era, but as victors who long ago transcended it.
MTV officially went dark in 2026, closing the chapter on the network that once decided what pop stardom looked like. For a generation, MTV didn’t just play Duran Duran, it made them, looping their glossy, cinematic videos into the global subconscious until the band became shorthand for a new idea of music as spectacle. Which made Duran Duran’s January 4 performance at Viejas Arena feel less like a victory lap and more like a quiet rebuttal: the platform that crowned them may be gone, but the band it built is very much alive.
From the moment the lights dropped, it was clear this wouldn’t be a nostalgia exercise. The show opened with “Velvet Newton,” a sleek, modern curtain-raiser that functioned as a statement of intent before detonating into “The Wild Boys,” still feral, still built for arenas. It was the kind of sequencing Duran Duran mastered in the MTV era – image first, impact second – but here it was executed in real time, without a camera doing the heavy lifting.
That lineage was impossible to miss. Duran Duran didn’t just benefit from MTV; they understood it earlier and better than almost anyone. Videos like Hungry Like the Wolf and Rio weren’t promotional tools so much as short films – sun-bleached, cinematic, aspirational – helping define the Second British Invasion and the New Romantic era as much through visuals as sound. At Viejas Arena, that sensibility resurfaced not as retro fetish, but as muscle memory. Throughout the night, expansive video backdrops, precision lighting cues, and tightly choreographed transitions transformed the stage into something closer to a living broadcast than a conventional concert…