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When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free.

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
Sheffield
Tape
Stick
Sticks
Free
Song
Music

More quotes by Rob Sheffield

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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.
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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
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It's always that one song that gets to you. You can hide, but the song comes to find you.
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Falling in love with Renee was not the kind of thing you walk away from in one piece. I had no chance. She put a hitch in my git-a-long.
Rob Sheffield
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You can't beat the beehive for glam punkette attitude.
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The hungry feeling and the lonely feeling merged until it was hard to tell them apart.
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'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.
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...some people aren't worth the trouble of being kind to, because they have neither the brains nor the power to make something for themselves out of your kindness.
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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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
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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.
Rob Sheffield
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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
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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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It goes without saying that 'Buncha Losers' comedies speak to tough times. The massive unemployment of the Reagan years gave us 'Taxi,' 'Cheers' and the genre-defining 'Night Court,' a show you could never admit to watching without making people feel sorry for you.
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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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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'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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When I was a junior, my school introduced badminton, which was clearly a P.E. department ploy to get me away from the wrestling room, and it worked, since the first time I played badminton was like the first time I tasted sushi or heard the Beatles or read Wordsworth. This was a sport? This counted for gym requirements?
Rob Sheffield
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Thank you for the music, Sleater-Kinney. This gang of three was the best American punk rock band ever. Ever.
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