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I didn't know what I was. I didn't have a noun.

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
Nouns
Didn
Noun

More quotes by Rob Sheffield

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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
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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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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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'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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But the answer is simple. Love is a mix tape.
Rob Sheffield
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One nice thing about growing up Catholic is it makes you open-minded about other people's religions, since ours is nuttier than yours.
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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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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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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The hungry feeling and the lonely feeling merged until it was hard to tell them apart.
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.
Rob Sheffield
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'American Horror' is the debasement of the suburban family, the way a lonely kid would have imagined it in the Seventies.
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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Seeing Taylor Swift live in 2013 is seeing a maestro at the top of her or anyone's game. No other pop auteur can touch her right now for emotional excess or musical reach - her punk is so punk, her disco is so disco. The red sequins on her guitar match the ones on her microphone, her shoes and 80 percent of the crowd.
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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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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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
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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
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There are all kinds of mix tapes. There is always a reason to make one.
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