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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

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Rob Sheffield
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: February 2
Journalist
Music Critic
Writer
the United States of America
Robert James Sheffield
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Stuck
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Stars
Lonely
Loser
Party
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Queens
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Nowhere
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Queen

More quotes by Rob Sheffield

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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
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I didn't know what I was. I didn't have a noun.
Rob Sheffield
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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
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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
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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
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A song nobody likes is a sad thing. But a love song nobody likes is hardly a thing at all.
Rob Sheffield
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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.
Rob Sheffield
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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 can add up to the story of a life.
Rob Sheffield
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I was totally clueless about social interaction, and completely scared of girls. All I knew was that music was going to make girls fall in love with me.
Rob Sheffield
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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
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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
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Every American wants a clean slate, but nobody wants to lose what they've got.
Rob Sheffield
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'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
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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
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You can't beat the beehive for glam punkette attitude.
Rob Sheffield
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I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.
Rob Sheffield
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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
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'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
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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.
Rob Sheffield
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It was bewildering and humbling to keep discovering how many brave things people can fail to talk themselves out of doing.
Rob Sheffield