Top 100 Rob Sheffield Quotes
#1. I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.
Rob Sheffield
#2. Morrissey was my Mrs. Garrett, the house mother from the Facts of Life, a soothing adult figure giving me words of wisdom.
Rob Sheffield
#3. Rebecca Black might sing like a robot, but that's just proof she has evolved beyond us. Her vocal is just a slightly exaggerated version of the robot glitch-twitch stutter that's been mainstream pop vocalese for the past 10 years or so.
Rob Sheffield
#4. '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
#5. 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.
Rob Sheffield
#6. But the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy, human bodies.
Rob Sheffield
#7. 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
#9. 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
#10. '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
#11. You can hear the Celtic heartbeat all over Europe and America, from Bing Crosby to Jack White, from the Smiths to My Bloody Valentine, from House of Pain to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.
Rob Sheffield
#12. Sometimes great tunes happen to bad times, and when the bad time is over, not all the tunes get to move on with you.
Rob Sheffield
#13. 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
#14. Love dies in many different ways, and it's natural for the grass to seem greener on the other side. But it's not a competition; there's plenty of pain to go around.
Rob Sheffield
#15. Nothing connects to the moment like music. I count the music to bring me back, or more precisely, to bring her forward.
Rob Sheffield
#16. ... .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!
Rob Sheffield
#17. Somtimes you lie in a strange room, in a strange person's home, and you feel yourself bending out of shape. Melting, touching something hot, something that warps you in drastic and probably irreversible ways you won't get to take stock of until its too late
Rob Sheffield
#18. When you're a Catholic kid, the nuns teach you that when something is annoying you, you "offer it up", as a sacrificial gift.
Rob Sheffield
#19. 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
#20. Renee loved to do things. That was mysterious to me, since I was more comfortable talking about things and never doing them. She liked passion. She liked adventure. I cowered from passion and talked myself out of adventure.
Rob Sheffield
#21. 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
#22. It's a fundamental human need to pass music around, and however the technology evolves, the music keeps moving.
Rob Sheffield
#23. 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.
Rob Sheffield
#24. I keep my friends around, try to stay close to them, try to treat them right. I try to stay in touch with my friends who are far away, and I do a bad job of that, but I carry them with me.
Rob Sheffield
#25. The hottest trash-disco star in the world: Ke$ha! She has a lot in common with Kiss, actually, even spelling her name with a dollar sign the way Gene Simmons probably always wanted to.
Rob Sheffield
#26. I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language.
Rob Sheffield
#27. I was the only kid at Camp Don Bosco who would admit he was an alter boy back home, so I served two masses a day all summer. But I loved the cassock and surplice, ringing the bells, lighting the candles - it was like being a glamrock roadie for God.
Rob Sheffield
#28. 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
#29. This is what they call "hitting rock bottom," and they call it that because it rocks.
Rob Sheffield
#30. That's the rub about 'Community' - for all the high-concept cleverness, it really comes down to vulgar humanism, the dumbest kind of sentimental identification. We watch it because we like these people and we miss them when they don't show up. They become part of the stories we tell ourselves.
Rob Sheffield
#31. Don't charge the mound. Once you agree to fight, you lost already. Don't start none, won't be none.
Rob Sheffield
#32. I hate when people question my ability to get from one place to another without mutilating myself. It's tantamount to saying, "Try to get home without screwing it up like last time, dummy," or "Farewell, for I may never see you again, given the mortality that awaits us all like a crouching panther.
Rob Sheffield
#33. 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.
Rob Sheffield
#34. That's the secret of 'True Blood' - all the creatures that roam Bon Temps become a metaphor for our insatiable lusts and inner desires. Humans craving what they can't have and those secret appetites transforming them into beasts, or even killers.
Rob Sheffield
#35. I didn't know what I was. I didn't have a noun.
Rob Sheffield
#36. 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.
Rob Sheffield
#37. 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
#38. One of Renee's friends asked her, "Does your boyfriend wear glasses?" She said, "No, he wears a Walkman.
Rob Sheffield
#39. Dave Matthews is mixing violin solos with saxophone solos and it's bad for the baby
Rob Sheffield
#40. He sang about girls in space-why not? That's where all the cool girls were. (They weren't where I could find them, that was for sure.)
Rob Sheffield
#41. A song nobody likes is a sad thing. But a love song nobody likes is hardly a thing at all.
Rob Sheffield
#42. 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
#43. Like any teenager who reads The Great Gatsby, probably, I was madly in love with the teacher who had opened it up for me.
Rob Sheffield
#44. 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.
Rob Sheffield
#45. For all karaoke freaks around the nation, "Total Eclipse of the Heart" is one of those sacred anthems. It's the kind of song that announces, "Dearly beloved, we have so totally gathered here today.
Rob Sheffield
#46. 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.
Rob Sheffield
#48. People who wave digital cameras at shows are the same people who sit in front of you at hockey games and wear those giant foam-rubber fingers that say, We're number one!'
Rob Sheffield
#49. Thanks to the greatest invention of recent years, the MP3-playing alarm clock, I can now choose the song that wakes me up in the morning.
Rob Sheffield
#50. If the girls keep dancing, everybody's happy. If the girls don't dance, nobody's happy.
Rob Sheffield
#51. When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free.
Rob Sheffield
#52. It was like trying to break up with the color orange, or Wednesday, or silent e. It was the most passionate and tumultuous relationship I'd ever known.
Rob Sheffield
#53. You lose a certain type of innocence when you experience this type of kindness. You lose your right to be a jaded cynic. You can no longer go back through the looking glass and pretend not to know what you know about kindness.
Rob Sheffield
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. You Like Music, I Like Music, I Can Tell We're Going to Be Friends
Rob Sheffield
#58. You can't beat the beehive for glam punkette attitude.
Rob Sheffield
#59. It was just another temporary technological mutation designed to do the same thing music always does, which is allow emotionally warped people to communicate
Rob Sheffield
#60. 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.
Rob Sheffield
#61. But "ma'am" doesn't translate in the North, where it just startles and offends.
Rob Sheffield
#62. 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.
Rob Sheffield
#63. 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
#64. And being a husband made me helpless, because I had somebody to protect (somebody a little high-strung, who had a tough time emotionally with things like the lights going out indefinitely).
Rob Sheffield
#65. Madonna was so flamboyant in terms of her look, her style, her public pronouncements, her religious taboo-smashing.
Rob Sheffield
#66. I was just one of those graves that pretty girls make.
Rob Sheffield
#67. Some of us are born Gladys Knights, and some of us are born Pips.
Rob Sheffield
#68. Jesus H. Christ on ice and Mary in the penalty box!
Rob Sheffield
#69. Dog love is blind. For that matter, dog love is stupid.
Rob Sheffield
#70. 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
#71. But bringing people together is what music has always done best.
Rob Sheffield
#72. 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
#73. Girls take up a lot of room. I had a lot of room for this one.
Rob Sheffield
#74. The Stones suggested that if you dabble in decadence, you could turn into a devil-worshipping junkie. Paul McCartney suggested that if you mess around with girl worship, you could turn into a husband. So Paul was a lot scarier.
Rob Sheffield
#75. She liked noise, she liked people, and she especially liked noisy people.
Rob Sheffield
#76. Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don't live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous.
Rob Sheffield
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 'The Queen Is Dead' is not merely the Smiths' best album, but it is one of those timeless, perfect, inexhaustible artifacts that could only have been made by a gang of sullen, sun-deprived rock & roll boys fighting off adulthood tooth and nail.
Rob Sheffield
#81. I felt indestructible, or at least undestroyed, more alive than I'd ever been.
Rob Sheffield
#82. Every American wants a clean slate, but nobody wants to lose what they've got.
Rob Sheffield
#83. The hungry feeling and the lonely feeling merged until it was hard to tell them apart.
Rob Sheffield
#84. 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.
Rob Sheffield
#85. The 2000s were the time when bromance became a kind of love that dared to speak its name. As a high-water mark of bro culture, nothing can ever top the MTV series 'Bromance,' with Brody Jenner and his search for a new BFF.
Rob Sheffield
#86. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is just perfect in 'Veep.' She gets to show off the spiky claws beneath her patrician finesse. The obvious way to play 'Veep' would be to make Louis-Dreyfus a folksy heroine, one with more common sense or populist heart than her enemies. But she isn't one.
Rob Sheffield
#87. Most of an award-show host's job is showing up and keeping a cool head and soldiering through it, whether it's the Oscars or the Hallmark Channel's 'Hero Dog Awards.'
Rob Sheffield
#88. I always envied my friends who had older siblings who could guide them through the teenage wasteland.
Rob Sheffield
#89. I still haven't finished unpacking - by the time I do, it'll be time to move again.
Rob Sheffield
#90. When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.
Rob Sheffield
#91. It was just a temporary technological mutation designed to do the same thing music always does, which is allow emotionally warped people to communicate by bombarding each other with pitiful cultural artifacts that in a saner world would be forgotten before they even happened.
Rob Sheffield
#92. 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.'
Rob Sheffield
#93. Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten.
Rob Sheffield
#94. 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
#95. I was a wallflower who planned to stay that way, who never imagined anybody else to be.
Rob Sheffield
#96. I've built my whole life around loving music. I'm a writer for 'Rolling Stone,' so I am constantly searching for new bands and soaking up new sounds.
Rob Sheffield
#97. On 'Idol,' Steven Tyler will be sitting at a table with two other judges, and part of his job will be keeping his yap zipped while they talk. This makes no sense at all, since Tyler has zero yap-zipping skills.
Rob Sheffield
#98. It was bewildering and humbling to keep discovering how many brave things people can fail to talk themselves out of doing.
Rob Sheffield
#99. 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
#100. Listening to it now is like a personally guided tour through my past.
Rob Sheffield
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