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61996fe
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But for me, if we're talking about romance, cassettes wipe the floor with MP3s. This has nothing to do with superstition, or nostalgia. MP3s buzz straight to your brain. That's part of what I love about them. But the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy, human bodies. The cassette is full of tape hiss and room tone; it's full of wasted space, unnecessary noise. Compared ..
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Rob Sheffield |
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9bd70f5
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IF ALL MUSIC DID WAS bring the past alive, that would be fine. You can hide away in music and let it recapture memories of things that used to be. But music is greedy and it wants more of your heart than that. It demands the future, your future. Music wants the rest of your life. So you can't rest easy. At any moment, a song can come out of nowhere to shake you up, jump-start your emotions, ruin your life.
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Rob Sheffield |
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b5101e4
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She would wake up in the middle of the night and say things like "What if Bad Bad Leroy Brown was a girl?" or "Why don't they have commercials for salt like they do for milk?"
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Rob Sheffield |
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c2ec837
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We have individual geekdoms that we've turned the other one on to and individual geekdoms we prefer to enjoy alone. There are also the geekdoms that inspire us to try to convert each other.
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Rob Sheffield |
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b862a00
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That same power translates everywhere, all around the world, because nothing expresses joy like singing together.
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Rob Sheffield |
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2c8c1c9
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A whole generation of southern girls, raised on the promise of Michael Stipe.
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Rob Sheffield |
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da7a8d9
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Rod exemplifies the attitude that Losing It is no big deal. He saw that fate coming, and he was already planning to get over it.
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Rob Sheffield |
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a798130
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Back when people listened to the radio, you kept a tape handy in your boombox at all times so you could capture the hot new hits of the week. The intro would always get cut off, and the DJ would chatter over the end. You also ended up with static, commercials, and jingles, but all that noise just added to the field-recording verisimilitude.
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Rob Sheffield |
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ba83059
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Some people like to make workout tapes and take them to the gym, but I can't fathom why. Any music I hear in a gym is ruined forever.
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Rob Sheffield |
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727eada
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I often took the bus to her apartment, where we drank bourbon and ginger ale, listened to the music we wanted to impress each other with, which eventually turned into listening to the music we actually liked.
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Rob Sheffield |
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24f5142
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Irish people marry late, as a rule. We have that potato-famine DNA from the old country, that mentality where you don't give birth to anything until you have the potatoes all stored up to feed it. My ancestors were all shepherds who got married in their thirties and then stayed together for life, who had long and happy marriages, no doubt because they were already deaf. My grandparents courted for nine years before they married in 1933.
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marriage
irish
potates
potato
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Rob Sheffield |
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5bd0a26
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When George was a kid he used to follow me and my first girlfriend, Cynthia--who became my wife--around. We'd come out of art school, and he'd be hovering around like those kids at the gate of the Dakota now.
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Rob Sheffield |
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40ee186
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it was just another temporary technological mutation designed to do the same thing music always does, which is allow emotionally warped people to communicate
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Rob Sheffield |
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7ee8d42
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Tonight, I feel like my whole body is made out of memories. I'm a mix tape, a cassette that's been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape.
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Rob Sheffield |
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986f8d3
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sometimes you can feel like you're experiencing some of the most honest, most intimate moments of your life, while butchering a Hall & Oates song at 2 a.m. in a room full of strangers.
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Rob Sheffield |
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3cd57c3
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I thought, There is nowhere else in the universe I would rather be at this moment. I could count the places I would not rather be. I've always wanted to see New Zealand, but I'd rather be here. The majestic ruins of Machu Picchu? I'd rather be here. A hillside in Cuenca, Spain, sipping coffee and watching leaves fall? Not even close. There is nowhere else I could imagine wanting to be besides here in this car, with this girl, on this road, ..
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Rob Sheffield |
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5db01c8
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I was looking for glimmers of light, but I only wanted to go looking for them in the hills where the dead spirits hung out.
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Rob Sheffield |
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01b9325
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There are all kinds of mix tapes. There is always a reason to make one.
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Rob Sheffield |
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3f3294e
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I made a new friend in the summer of 1999 who wore a rubber band around her wrist with Paul Westerberg's name written on it. Her favorite song was "Unsatisfied" and she gave the song back to me, without knowing she was doing it, and soon I loved it as much as ever."
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Rob Sheffield |
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5a4a0c3
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If you freak out over trivial everyday grievances, how are you going to handle *real* problems?
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Rob Sheffield |
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b20a557
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But right now, karaoke is one of the places where we go to form our own culture club, which is one of the millions of things a relationship is--building a shared language out of the things that fire up your blood. Couples need as many of those languages as they can get.
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Rob Sheffield |
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a3505ad
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But things started to wobble around the time R.E.M. put out a truly wretched album called Document, the one that made her reconsider whether she could continue to worship Michael Stipe. I blamed R.E.M. for not saving us by making a better record. That, I realize now, was unfair.
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Rob Sheffield |
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ac2ff40
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How do you turn down the volume on your personal-drama earphones and learn how to listen to other people?
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Rob Sheffield |
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e878b7d
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The party never stopped at Mick's place. He categorized three phases of a good drug binge: ascending, transcending, disintegration.
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Rob Sheffield |
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8419379
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But if you listen to outtakes from the sessions, you can hear the Beatles worked out harmonies for "Eight Days a Week"--beautiful harmonies, in fact. Yet they cut the harmonies and sang in unison, to make the song sound like it took less work than it did. They spent seven hours in the studio tinkering with "Eight Days a Week," adding and subtracting, until they got that unrehearsed feel. So much guile went into making the song sound like a ..
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Rob Sheffield |
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967d7ba
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There are two schools of thought about Ringo: (1) he was a brilliant drummer who made the Beatles possible, or (2) he was a clod who got lucky, the biggest fool who ever hit the big time.
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Rob Sheffield |
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5d8973b
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Prince, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" (2004)"
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Rob Sheffield |
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7ba4171
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The early Seventies were a gold rush for double-vinyl samplers from Sixties heavyweights--the Stones' 1971 Hot Rocks, the Kinks' 1972 Kink Kronikles, the Doors' 1972 Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine, the Beach Boys' 1974 Endless Summer. Best of all: Bob Dylan's 1971 Greatest Hits Volume II, with virtually no hits, just deep cuts chosen by the artist.
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Rob Sheffield |
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6d6c57b
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13. The Chemical Brothers, "Setting Sun" (1996) Everybody's favorite song in the fall of 1996, uniting rockers, ravers, clubbers, druggers, all factions of the pop massive. The Chemical Brothers turn "Tomorrow Never Knows" into a banging techno loop, warping Ringo's block-rocking beats into something new. "Setting Sun" is unaccountably obscure these days, considering what a fact of life it was for a year or so, but it's a song that accurate..
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Rob Sheffield |
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491bf33
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20. Bob Dylan, "4th Time Around" (1966) Right after Rubber Soul dropped, Bob Dylan recorded Blonde on Blonde, where he sang this scorchingly funny parody of "Norwegian Wood." Dylan unkindly played "4th Time Around" for John in London. As Lennon recalled in 1968, "He said, 'What do you think?' I said, 'I don't like it.' " Yeah, well--talk about the anxiety of influence. All over Blonde on Blonde, you can hear how hard Dylan was feeling Rubbe..
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Rob Sheffield |
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6d0536f
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Side One of 1967-1970 is up there with Side Three of Hot Rocks in the annals of great vinyl sides. ("Strawberry Fields," "Penny Lane," "Sgt. Pepper," "With a Little Help," "Lucy," "A Day in the Life," and "All You Need Is Love" vs. "Jumpin' Jack Flash," "Street Fighting Man," "Sympathy for the Devil," "Honky Tonk Women," and "Gimme Shelter." Damn.) For the Beatles, it was just another rip-off repackage."
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Rob Sheffield |
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baeb930
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But the best cover has to be D'Angelo, on his long-awaited 2012 comeback tour--within minutes of the first gig in Paris, the whole world was YouTubing his "Space Oddity" with our jaws hanging open. After all those years away, lost in his own personal tin can, D'Angelo came back to strum his acoustic guitar and work the hell out of "tell my wife I love her very much" line."
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Rob Sheffield |
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ea385d4
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24. The Rutles, "Cheese and Onions" (1978) A legend to last a lunchtime. The Rutles were the perfect Beatle parody, starring Monty Python's Eric Idle and the Bonzos' Neil Innes in their classic mock-doc All You Need Is Cash, with scene-stealing turns by George Harrison, Mick Jagger, and Paul Simon. (Interviewer: "Did the Rutles influence you at all?" Simon: "No." Interviewer: "Did they influence Art Garfunkel?" Simon: "Who?") "Cheese and On..
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Rob Sheffield |
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aa4b9cf
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Yet Bowie was just hitting his golden years, rushing out his five best albums from 1976 to 1980, the best five-album run of anyone in the seventies (or since): Station to Station, Low, "Heroes," Lodger, and Scary Monsters. In this time span, he also made the two albums that brought back Iggy Pop from the dead--The Idiot, prized by Bowie freaks as a rare showcase for his eccentric lead guitar, and Lust for Life--and his finest live album, St..
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Rob Sheffield |
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4c0e7f4
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Whatever music you were into, it was exploding in the Nineties. Guitar bands, hip-hop, R&B, techno, country, Britpop, trip-hop, blip-hop, ambient, illbient, jungle, ska, swing, Belgian jam bands, Welsh gangsta rap--every music genre you could name (or couldn't)--(and a few that probably didn't really exist) was on a roll that made the Sixties look picayune and provincial. We can argue all day whether Nineties music holds up, but fans devour..
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Rob Sheffield |
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ac2a01c
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It all culminated in the 1995 Anthology, which would have seemed like an embarrassing defeat only a few years earlier. The record company had figured out how to treat the catalog as a prestige item; the 1982 Reel Music compilation was the final U.S. release that could be described as a rip-off. The "drop-T" logo belatedly became a thing, with its elegant serifs--it never appeared on any original Beatle albums, but in the Nineties it became ..
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Rob Sheffield |
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0f95a75
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The world couldn't have been hungrier for Anthology, with a ten-hour documentary and three huge-selling volumes of outtakes, turning into a joyous global celebration. The Anthology double-CD packages might have been more purchased than played (everybody back then bought more music than they had time to listen to). They included two new songs, Lennon tape fragments that the others finished: "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love." The flaw was Jeff..
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Rob Sheffield |
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1511955
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My favorite prototypical Beatlemaniac appears in the great documentary The Compleat Beatles, in a TV news clip.
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Rob Sheffield |
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75d9fbb
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But the intimate candor of their voices, the wit of the guitars and drums--it all makes Rubber Soul my favorite story they had to tell. Even the American version--this is the only case where the shamefully butchered U.S. LP might top the U.K. original, if only because it opens with the magnificent one-two punch of "I've Just Seen a Face" and "Norwegian Wood." I still can't decide which Rubber Soul is my favorite, having had a mere lifetime ..
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Rob Sheffield |
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03b1b4a
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But with their backs against the wall, the Beatles produced an album far ahead of anything they'd done before. Since these guys were riding new levels of musical fluidity and inspiration, firing on so many more cylinders than anybody else had, they stumbled onto discoveries that changed the way music has been made ever since. It was an accidental masterpiece--but one that stunned them into realizing how far they could go. After that, they w..
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Rob Sheffield |
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7dbe89e
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Bowie's five best albums came all in a five-year rush: Station to Station (1976), Low (1977), "Heroes" (1977), Lodger (1979), Scary Monsters (1980). What do these albums have in common? The rhythm section: Dennis Davis on drums, George Murray on bass, and Carlos Alomar on guitar."
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Rob Sheffield |
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f9d951a
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If you tell people you're writing a book about the Beatles, at first they smile and ask, "Another one? What's left to say?" So I mention "Baby's in Black," or "It's All Too Much," or Lil Wayne's version of "Help" or the Kendrick Lamar battle rhyme where he says "blessings to Paul McCartney," or Hollywood Bowl, or Rock 'n' Roll Music, or the Beastie Boys' "I'm Down"--but I rarely get that far, because they're already jumping in with their fa..
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Rob Sheffield |
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b312647
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John didn't score his first Number One hit until 1974, the fourth Beatle to reach this milestone (Ringo beat him twice), but he got over with "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night," with a big assist from Elton John. It's not a famous song anymore, for the understandable reason that the final line is "Don't need a gun to blow your mind." After December 1980, "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night" dropped off the radio and hasn't been heard since. B..
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Rob Sheffield |
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3d78a1e
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You've Really Got a Hold on Me" and "Money (That's What I Want)," but for me "Please Mr. Postman" houses them both. It's another blizzard of oh yeah screams--in America "Please Mr. Postman" was on The Beatles' Second Album alongside "She Loves You" and "I'll Get You," making it a concept album about the word "yeah."
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Rob Sheffield |