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" We all get as miserable as Erika M. Andersen sometimes, but we rarely approach her musical-ideas-per-miserable-minute ratio. "
Rob Sheffield
Get
Sometimes
Miserable
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" Like many other touchstones of twenty-first-century pop culture, 'The Sopranos' was hatched in the late Nineties, predicting a future that never arrived. It was designed for a decade that would be just like the Nineties, except more so, in an America that enjoyed seeing itself as smarter and braver and freer than ever before. "
Rob Sheffield
Future
Culture
Seeing
" It takes only one bad amp to turn your ears to oatmeal: That's how old hippies became Yanni fans. "
Rob Sheffield
Turn
Only
Old
" You'd think if anyone could charm America into caring about the evening news, it would be Katie Couric, the Tri Delt from Virginia who became America's sweetheart on the 'Today' show. But her ratings have been dismal - she comes in last place every week. "
Rob Sheffield
You
America
Caring
" Seeing Taylor Swift live in 2013 is seeing a maestro at the top of her or anyone's game. No other pop auteur can touch her right now for emotional excess or musical reach - her punk is so punk, her disco is so disco. The red sequins on her guitar match the ones on her microphone, her shoes and 80 percent of the crowd. "
Rob Sheffield
Reach
Live
Guitar
" Movies for adults sucked in the 1980s, and music for adults sucked even worse; whether we're talking about Kathleen Turner flicks or Sting albums, the decade's non-teen culture has no staying power at all. "
Rob Sheffield
Movies
Talking
Music
" When I started out as a music journalist, at the end of the 1980s, it was generally assumed that we were living through the lamest music era the world would ever see. But those were also the years when hip-hop exploded, beatbox disco soared, indie rock took off, and new wave invented a language of teen angst. "
Rob Sheffield
Rock
Music
Language
" One of the billions of things I love about Beyonce: The harder she tries to come on crazy, the less crazy she sounds. "
Rob Sheffield
She
Things
Come
" 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. "
Rob Sheffield
Time
Best
Church
" Celebrity despicability is a precious thing. "
Rob Sheffield
Celebrity
Thing
Precious
" 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. "
Rob Sheffield
Hometown
Tough
World
" 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. "
Rob Sheffield
Like
Feeling
Whatever
" The first season of 'Community' stumbled a bit because the plotlines too often veered into realism, but that is not a problem anymore. Not when prize episodes concern a campuswide blanket fort, or a secret garden with a magic trampoline. "
Rob Sheffield
Problem
Garden
First
" 'The Voice' has lots of singers who fit the 'Idol' mold of young, innocent ingenues with psycho stage moms. But it also has long-suffering adult pros, with a whiff of thirtysomething despair in their voices. That adds an edge of realness. "
Rob Sheffield
Edge
Despair
Innocent
" I will always love the Clash, because I loved them so much when I was fourteen, and I love how you can start a conversation with almost literally any dude about the Clash. "
Rob Sheffield
Loved
Love
You
" The sax solo as we know it today would not exist without Gerry Rafferty. His 1978 soft-rock classic 'Baker Street' has to be the 'Ulysses' of rock & roll saxophone, giving the entire chorus over to Raphael Ravenscroft's sax solo, creating one of the Seventies' most enduringly creepy sounds. "
Rob Sheffield
Street
Rock
Over
" 'The Sopranos' gets praised as novelistic, but it follows the most banal of life patterns, showing the sheer tedium of being a mobster. It has dead spots, boring plotlines, weak episodes. Characters develop slowly, or don't. Like viewers, a gangster might get bored, fade out of the action, then come back to find none of his debts forgotten. "
Rob Sheffield
Life
Gangster
Boring
" One of the best moments of any Liars show is hearing the crowd squawk 'We're doomed! We're doomed!' on cue during 'We Fenced Other Houses with the Bones of Our Own.' Maybe not the most uplifting audience sing-along in the indie rock world, but one of the most reliably entertaining. "
Rob Sheffield
Audience
World
Rock
" 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.' "
Rob Sheffield
She
You
Yourself
" 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. "
Rob Sheffield
Weird
Loneliness
Pet
" '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. "
Rob Sheffield
Horror
American
Black
" Madonna was so flamboyant in terms of her look, her style, her public pronouncements, her religious taboo-smashing. "
Rob Sheffield
Her
Style
Look
" When Ke$ha tries to rap like L'Trimm, she sounds like any ordinary lonely teenage girl stuck in a nowhere town, singing along to her radio and dreaming of a party where she's the star. Ke$ha's greatness is that in her voice, you can hear both the loser girl and the star. All hail the Queen of Noi$e! "
Rob Sheffield
Greatness
Girl
Voice
" 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. "
Rob Sheffield
God
Life
Love
" 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. "
Rob Sheffield
She
Artist
Summer
" Just as Bowie, Zeppelin, etc., became rock stars by remaking themselves in the image of the California girls, the Go-Gos became rock stars by pretending to be the Buzzcocks and the Sex Pistols. Jane Wiedlin always said her biggest influence was growing up in L.A. as a Bowie girl. "
Rob Sheffield
Girl
Rock
Growing Up
" Lots of people like Seth MacFarlane. Many other people like watching the Oscars. But nobody likes both, not even Seth MacFarlane, who has no idea what the Oscars are. "
Rob Sheffield
Watching
People
Nobody
" 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. "
Rob Sheffield
Best
Girl
Name
" You can't beat the beehive for glam punkette attitude. "
Rob Sheffield
Beehive
Attitude
You
" Like most fans of 'So You Think You Can Dance,' I wouldn't know a pasodoble if it beat me with a rake. "
Rob Sheffield
Dance
Me
Think
" 'So You Think You Can Dance' comes on as a high-minded leap up the evolutionary ladder from other reality shows - on this one, you're supposed to learn something, and the guest judges are fellow dance professionals rather than actual celebrities. "
Rob Sheffield
Think
Judges
Leap