Rob Sheffield Quotes - Page 3

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.

We all get as miserable as Erika M. Andersen sometimes, but we rarely approach her musical-ideas-per-miserable-minute ratio.

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.

It takes only one bad amp to turn your ears to oatmeal: That's how old hippies became Yanni fans.

Like most fans of 'So You Think You Can Dance,' I wouldn't know a pasodoble if it beat me with a rake.

Thank you for the music, Sleater-Kinney. This gang of three was the best American punk rock band ever. Ever.

One nice thing about growing up Catholic is it makes you open-minded about other people's religions, since ours is nuttier than yours.

'Drive,' that's the one. I love dozens of songs by R.E.M., but that's the one, even though it took me 7 or 8 years to start liking it.

Davy Jones was the grooviest of the Monkees, which makes him one of the grooviest pop stars who ever existed. He was the best dancer in the Monkees, the Cute One, the one with the coy English accent, the bowl-cut boy-child who shook those cherry-red maracas and always got the girl. He was also the guy who stole David Bowie's original name.

God bless America - what other civilization would give Patrick Dempsey another shot to rule as a sex symbol, twenty years after 'Meatballs III: Summer Job?' His reign as Dr. McDreamy on 'Grey's Anatomy' is proof that there's nothing we love more than giving Eighties celebs a heartwarming second stab at life.

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.

Our amour fou with 'The Sopranos' is headed for long-term parking, like so many of its most memorable characters. We'll never see a show like this again.

'American Horror' is the debasement of the suburban family, the way a lonely kid would have imagined it in the Seventies.

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.'

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.

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.

Madonna was so flamboyant in terms of her look, her style, her public pronouncements, her religious taboo-smashing.

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.

It's kind of amazing how popular 'Grey's Anatomy' is. What other show can boast such an annoyingly sincere cast of doctors, sniveling through such perfunctory love triangles?

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.

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.

Celebrity despicability is a precious thing.

In their heyday, the Pet Shop Boys were the Interpol of the Eighties, dressing up to sing really weird pop songs about lust and loneliness in the big city. They're low-pro now, not retro-worshipped in the manner of Depeche Mode, New Order, or The Cure, but you can hear the reason why - these guys are too sad.

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.

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.