Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
All Quotes by author - Rob Sheffield
" Ah, the bond between English boys and California girls. For those of us who aren't either, it's a bond that fascinates and mystifies. So much of the world's favorite music comes out of that relationship. "
Us
Relationship
Music
" 'American Horror' goes for a very specific kind of Seventies suburban downer ambience - 'Flowers in the Attic' paperbacks, Black Sabbath album covers and late-night flicks like 'Let's Scare Jessica to Death.' It even has 'Go Ask Alice'-era urban legends. "
Horror
American
Black
" 'American Horror' is the debasement of the suburban family, the way a lonely kid would have imagined it in the Seventies. "
Way
Family
American
" Anyone watching '30 Rock' always knew Tina Fey was playing a fictionalized version of herself, a workaholic comedy writer who also plays one on TV. She's the boss; Liz Lemon just works here. "
Rock
She
Here
" At an incredibly divisive point in pop history, Donna Summer managed to create an undeniable across-the-board experience of mass pleasure - after 'Bad Girls,' nobody ever tried claiming disco sucked again. It set the template for what Michael Jackson would do a few months later with 'Off The Wall.' "
Summer
History
Experience
" Baseball's Opening Day is full of time-honored traditions: the President throws out the first ball, the Cubs' starting pitcher walks away with a 54.00 ERA, the Royals get mathematically eliminated from the pennant race. "
Opening
Day
Baseball
" Being a pop fan is a lot like Catholic devotion - lots of ritual, lots of ceremony... We touch the icon to enter the sacred space, genuflecting to reliquaries and ostentatoria that make something splendid of our most secret desires and agonies. "
Touch
Space
Devotion
" Big Star invented a vision of bohemian rock & roll cool that had nothing to do with New York, Los Angeles or London, which made them completely out of style in the 1970s, but also made them an inspiration to generations of weird Southern kids. "
Weird
Style
New York
" Both of my books, 'Love Is a Mix Tape' and 'Talking to Girls About Duran Duran,' are about how music gets tangled up with all our other emotional memories. Since I'm an obsessive music fan, I'm always seeking out new sonic thrills. "
Music
Love
Love Is
" 'Buncha Losers' comedy is one of those homegrown American art forms, up there with infomercials and Elvis-shaped soap carvings. No other civilization could have invented it. The French took a stab with Sartre's 'No Exit,' but then they had to ruin it with a lesson at the end. "
American
Lesson
Exit
" But MTV relishes its vestigial role as a star maker, so every year it puts all its clout into making the VMAs the biggest, splashiest, loudest show-biz extravaganza of the year, honoring all this music for existing, after a year of paying barely any attention to it. "
Music
Attention
Loudest
" Celebrity despicability is a precious thing. "
Celebrity
Thing
Precious
" Davy Jones was the grooviest of the Monkees, which makes him one of the grooviest pop stars who ever existed. He was the best dancer in the Monkees, the Cute One, the one with the coy English accent, the bowl-cut boy-child who shook those cherry-red maracas and always got the girl. He was also the guy who stole David Bowie's original name. "
Best
Girl
Name
" Donna Summer would be remembered as a ground-breaking artist today even if she'd retired the day after she recorded 'I Feel Love' in 1977. "
She
Artist
Summer
" Do you believe in Madonna? Because Lady Gaga has got something to say about 'Express Yourself,' and she's turned Madonna's fourth-best single of 1989 into her own instant-classic club anthem, 'Born This Way.' "
She
You
Yourself
" 'Drive,' that's the one. I love dozens of songs by R.E.M., but that's the one, even though it took me 7 or 8 years to start liking it. "
Songs
Years
Start
" Every American wants a clean slate, but nobody wants to lose what they've got. "
Lose
American
Nobody
" Every moment of my life has a soundtrack, so I never know when some song is going to jump me by surprise and bring the memory alive. "
My Life
Me
Life
" Every now and then, Prince decides to try being a normal rock star. You know, the kind who does a professional arena tour where he plays the hits. But part of what makes him such an eternally fascinating star is that he lives in his own private purple world, even when he sets out to make the house quake. "
World
Know
Professional
" God bless America - what other civilization would give Patrick Dempsey another shot to rule as a sex symbol, twenty years after 'Meatballs III: Summer Job?' His reign as Dr. McDreamy on 'Grey's Anatomy' is proof that there's nothing we love more than giving Eighties celebs a heartwarming second stab at life. "
God
Life
Love
" Hardly anyone liked R.E.M. who didn't like them way too much, so part of being an R.E.M. fan meant getting wildly overinvested and then feeling vaguely disappointed by whatever they did next. "
Like
Feeling
Whatever
" Hometown Aerosmith fans are different from other Aerosmith fans, and that mainly has to do with Joe Perry. It's tough to overstate his strange grip on the local psyche. Tyler is a star who belongs to the whole world, but Perry, that dude belongs to Boston. "
Hometown
Tough
World
" In their heyday, the Pet Shop Boys were the Interpol of the Eighties, dressing up to sing really weird pop songs about lust and loneliness in the big city. They're low-pro now, not retro-worshipped in the manner of Depeche Mode, New Order, or The Cure, but you can hear the reason why - these guys are too sad. "
Weird
Loneliness
Pet
" In the old days, when a star left a still-thriving hit show, they'd celebrate by killing him or her off. But 'The Office' dispatched Michael Scott in a crueler and more final way: they made him normal. Since we're talking about Michael Scott, 'normal' might be stretching it, obviously. "
Talking
Way
Celebrate
" It goes without saying that 'Buncha Losers' comedies speak to tough times. The massive unemployment of the Reagan years gave us 'Taxi,' 'Cheers' and the genre-defining 'Night Court,' a show you could never admit to watching without making people feel sorry for you. "
Tough Times
Sorry
Tough
" It's easy to see why 'American Horror' is freaking people out. The ultraviolent hallucinations never pause long enough to make sense. In terms of coherence, it makes your average David Lynch movie look like 'Burn Notice.' "
People
Enough
American
" It's kind of amazing how popular 'Grey's Anatomy' is. What other show can boast such an annoyingly sincere cast of doctors, sniveling through such perfunctory love triangles? "
Love
Show
Kind
" It takes only one bad amp to turn your ears to oatmeal: That's how old hippies became Yanni fans. "
Turn
Only
Old
" It was in that bubble after Vatican II when it seemed like the best time ever to grow up Catholic. It was a time when the church was so connected to the world. "
Time
Best
Church
" It was R.E.M. who showed other Eighties bands how to get away with ignoring the rules - they lived in some weird town nobody never heard of, they didn't play power chords, they probably couldn't even spell 'spandex.' All they had was songs. "
Nobody
Play
Power
Check our other websites:
BookDark
MusicDark