|
d5fb6ca
|
We recognize that smile when we see it in the mirror, or on the faces of our friends, at weddings, anniversaries, christenings, or ordinary afternoons. It's the smile of a man realizing he is no longer a kid, and although he has no idea how it happened, he's pretty sure it would make a cool story if he ever gets a spare minute to piece it all together.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
2891838
|
Rock stars did not invent burning out. They just do it louder.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
5676e4c
|
Learning, over and over. The work of love will make you bloody and it will make you lonely.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
cfb9484
|
Don't charge the mound. Once you agree to fight, you lost already. Don't start none, won't be none.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
81f0858
|
I was a wallflower who planned to stay that way, who never imagined anybody else to be.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
3139d5f
|
Neither of us ever threw anything away. We made a lot of mix tapes while we were together. Tapes for making out, tapes for dancing, tapes for falling asleep. Tapes for doing the dishes, for walking the dog. I kept them all. I have them piled up on my bookshelves, spilling out of my kitchen cabinets, scattered all over the bedroom floor. I don't even have pots or pans in my kitchen, just that old boom-box on the counter, next to the sink. So..
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
f7f913f
|
The country singers understand. It's always that one song that gets you. You can hide, but the song comes to find you. Country singers are always twanging about that number on the jukebox they can't stand to hear you play, the one with the memories.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
354e614
|
What I get out of karaoke is a little weirder than mere musical competence. It's a love ritual that keeps me coming back, craving more, because this is where the songs are. And the songs are full of stories. Every one we sing is charged up with memories of the past or dreams of the future. Every song reminds me of good times or bad times. Yet they all hold surprises.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
643dc1d
|
To enter into that karaoke mindset, you have to leave behind all your notions of good or bad, right or wrong, in tune or out of tune. The kara in the word karaoke is the same as the one in karate, which means 'empty hand.' They're both 'empty' arts because you have no weapons and no musical instruments to hide behind--only courage, your heart, and your will to inflict pain.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
c52ca0e
|
Girls are the White Album and they all have Revolution 9's. They have all that stuff you wish you could edit out. When you fall in love with a girl, she's the bloody White Album. That is what you whisper to yourself, when you don't understand her at all. You just keep telling yourself, she's the bloody Beatles White Album and there's only one of her.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
65a08bc
|
Just more of that endless, useless knowledge you absorb when you're in a relationship, with no meaning or relevance outside of that relationship. When the relationship's gone, you're stuck knowing all this garbage.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
565eb94
|
When you want to start living, what do you do? How do you start? Where do you go? Who do you need to blow?
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
cd994c8
|
But when you're a teenage boy, you can be narrow-minded about things that are girlie, things that are frivolous, things that are pop. Boys always want to be taken seriously, and they always want to transcend the tawdry emotion of the pop singer -- it's a fairly standard response to the rigors of young manhood... This isn't so different from how people talk about culture now. Rock epics are for boys; pop hits are for girls. When you're a boy..
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
72d3257
|
I get sentimental over the music of the '90s. Deplorable, really. But I love it all. As far as I'm concerned, the '90s was the best era for music ever, even the stuff that I loathed at the time, even the stuff that gave me stomach cramps. Every note from those years is charged with life for me now. For instance, I hated Pearl Jam at the time. I thought they were pompous blowhards. Now, whenever a Pearl Jam song comes on the car radio, I fin..
|
|
pearl-jam
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
55ee1da
|
Nothing connects to the moment like music.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
ef84c65
|
Back home, my favorite part of Mass was during communion, when I'd stand at the rail and hold a little gold platter under people's chins. The pretty girls would line up for communion (I confess to Almighty God). They'd kneel (and to you my brothers and sisters), cast their eyes demurely down (I have sinned through my own fault), and stick out their tongues (in my thoughts and in my words). Their tongues would shine, reflected in the gold pl..
|
|
religion
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
080c6aa
|
At work she became instant best friends with the Clinique girl, Susan, a Waynesboro muscle-car aficionado. She was fond of dispensinf wisdom along the lines or: "The bullshit stops when the green light pops!" I'd go to the mall to pick up Renee. take them both a couple of coffees, and hang out while they chattered in their hot white coats. Susan would take Renee to hot-rod shows and run-what-ya-brung drag races. She brought out sides of Ren..
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
93c71c5
|
Something I really enjoy about older couples is that they really have given up on getting everything right. They don't sweat the imperfections.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
0300e57
|
He said 'My kingdom is not of this world.' So did Bowie. It tapped into the whole Catholic idea of creating your own saints, finding icons of divinity in the mundane. As a religion, Bowieism didn't seem so different from Catholicism - the hemlines were just a little higher.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
5909551
|
Renee used to say real life was a bad country song, except bad country songs were believable and real life isn't.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
c31c268
|
I was too scared to talk, but I was more scared to not talk.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
9ec6548
|
I grew up on country radio. You know I'm a sucker for that 'we got no money but we got love' crap.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
29d7ed4
|
You're in a physical landscape you share with this bizarre and fundamentally alien creature, not alien because she's female but alien because you're a fool in love and there's nothing not alien about that.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
7021d62
|
is a relic from - when else? - the '70s. This is a tape I made for the eight-grade dance. The tape still plays, even if the cogs are a little creaky and the sound quality is dismal. It's a ninety-minute TDK Compact Cassette, and like everything else made in the '70s, it's beige. It takes me back to the fall of 1979, when I was a shy, spastic, corduroy-clad Catholic kid from the suburbs of Boston, grief-stricken over the '78 Red Sox. The wor..
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
fa63d88
|
For instance, I hated Pearl Jam at the time. I thought they were pompous blowhards. Now, whenever a Pearl Jam song comes on the car radio, I find myself pounding my fist on the dashboard, screaming, "Pearl JAM! Pearl JAM! Now this is rock and roll! Jeremy's SPO-ken! But he's still al-LIIIIIVE!"
|
|
music
pearl-jam
nostalgia
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
807a22c
|
I suck at fighting. I have never really learned how to talk and be mad at the same time. If I have angry words to say, I need time to rehearse. I can't improvise when my head's dizzy with adrenaline; I have to cool down and then write out a script. I found this trait very difficult when I was trying to be a boyfriend, because in my experience, boyfriends and girlfriends often spend a lot of time fighting. Husbands and wives seem to spend a ..
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
33abdb1
|
When Renee and I talked about it years later, we agreed on one point: We were insane. Renee always said, "If any of our kids want to get married when they're twenty-five, we'll have to lock them in the attic." We were just kids, and everybody who came to the wedding party was guilty of shameful if not criminal negligence-- look at the shiny pretty toaster, isn't it cute to see the babies playing with it in the bathtub? Jesus, people!"
|
|
love
mania
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
742d276
|
I had never gotten the hang of dating -- I was always going to be somebody who either had a girlfriend or didn't.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
a2c55d8
|
The important thing isn't that we're freakazoidal about the same things--it's that she's as freakazoidal about her stuff as I am about mine, and that enthusiasm can't help but unite us, even if the object thereof doesn't. If two people are twisted enough to connect on a deep level, it's only natural there will be lots of angles where they don't connect at all.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
57d7e4a
|
They're never technically tapes, but they're always called mix tapes anyway, just because tapes are always cool.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
611b21b
|
you may not be the target audience for new music anymore. But that just means you have to scrounge a little harder to find it. You don't necessarily want to make a religion out of it; you just want to keep participating. Music isn't an accessory to a lifestyle--it's part of a life. It's not a youthful phase you go through.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
17daad7
|
At Camp Don Bosco, there were Bibles all over the place, mostly 1970s hippie versions like Good News for Modern Man. They had groovy titles like The Word or The Way, and translated the Bible into "contemporary English," which meant Saul yelling at Jonathan, "You son of a bitch!" (I Samuel 20:30). Awesome! The King James version gave this verse as "Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman," which was bogus in comparison. Maybe these transla..
|
|
religion
music
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
a07821a
|
I've never heard of anybody getting rid of their prized Exile postcards, much less actually writing on them and sending them through the mail to a girl. I watched these two, laughing over this story at the same kitchen table they've shared for thirty years. I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.
|
|
music
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
cacb556
|
We had nothing in common, except we both loved music. It was the first connection we had, and we depended on it to keep us together. We did a lot of work to meet in the middle. Music brought us together. So now music was stuck with us.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
67b174c
|
No worries" is the best thing to happen to sullen teenagers since I was one - even better than vampire sexting, GTL, or Call of Duty. When I was a sullen teenager, we had to make do wtih the vastly inferior "whatever". "No worries" beats "whatever" six ways to Sunday. I'ts a vaguely mystical way of saying "I hear your mouth make noise, saying something that I plan to ignore." It has a noble Rasta-man vibe, as if you're quoting some sort of ..
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
c6bd349
|
I've played the song for a lot of people who respond, 'Hmmmm, this is interesting,' but in a way it's more like 'There are two exits in this room, the window and the door. If this song doesn't end soon, I'm going to opt for the window.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
53cea75
|
Listening to it now is like a personally guided tour through my past.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
73996a4
|
Walter Benjamin, in his prescient 1923 essay "One Way Street," said a book was an outdated means of communication between two boxes of index cards. One professor goes through books, looking for tasty bits he can copy onto index cards. Then he types his index cards up into a book, so other professors can go through it and copy tasty bits onto their own index cards. Benjamin's joke was: Why not just sell the index cards? I guess that's why we..
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
a2c78b9
|
I had never been so extravagantly proud of having blood that clotted.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
752ad0c
|
Tacos will grow on Christmas trees before I learn to carry a tune. Fortunately, it doesn't matter. In karaoke, talent means nada; enthusiasm is everything. What I lack in talent, I make up for in passion. Hence my karaoke problem.
|
|
passion
karaoke
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
4c085b3
|
I hear the noise in his voice, and I hear a boy trying to scare the darkness away. I wish I could hear what happened next, but nothing did.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
3d4ba69
|
Don't go home with that magic man! I wanted to shake my Walkman, warn the Heart girls to run away. Don't trust him! He might be magic, but he's not very nice! He says he just wants to get high awhile, but he'll get you so high you can't come back down. He'll make you stay inside so long, it hurts your eyes to go out, so you'll spend whole years wasting away in his mansion. You'll lose your sense of time. You'll lose your appetite. When your..
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
b6e04c1
|
The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with--nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of a life.
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |
|
0307e36
|
And they're right--what could be scarier, stupider, than staying together? How else could you totally guarantee that you would always have reasons to be terrified?
|
|
|
Rob Sheffield |