I’ve read four books by Rob Sheffield. Two were excellent (“Turn Around Bright Eyes” about Karaoke and “Love is a Mix Tape” about, well, mixtapes), one was OK (On Bowie), and the one on Taylor Swift (Heartbreak is the National Anthem) was honestly mediocre.
I have some notes on Heartbreak is the National Anthem live already.
Rob Sheffield Quotes From Turn Around Bright Eyes:
On Grace: “I distrust grace when it’s amazing. I like my grace to be drab and ordinary and manageable. And I prefer the universe to be methodical and tedious, making its moves one at a time, with change as something I can see coming in the distance, a slow train round the bend.”
On His Dad’s Parenting Style: “My dad was never much of a disciplinarian. He never told us not to do anything, because he figured, why put ideas into our heads… So we never did anything.” & “His way of parenting my sisters and me was to compliment us for things we weren’t even doing, but his compliments made us want to start doing them. If he was annoyed by my impatience, he would compliment me on my patience. Somehow that would instinctively make me strive to be more patient.” Basically, lots of positive reinforcement and reverse psychology. Apparently it worked out.
On Lame Lifetime Leading Ladies: “The point is, sometimes we plucky little Lifetime heroines need a shove to embark upon difficult transitions. We need backstabbing, bloodletting vixens, or their philosophical equivalents. We need a strong personality, or cataclysmic force…”
On Lifetime ladies: “Lifetime ladies, they were my people, keeping my company as if we were cycle sisters via the airwaves. These gals took the same pitifully cautious approach to their pitifully cautious tomorrows as I did. When the future looks bad, they stick to the script and hope the future will go away. They’re always surprised when it doesn’t.” What horrible programming!
On Relationships: “Two people, two genuinely good people, can try to make each other happy but fail. In fact, they can make each other wretched.”
On Starting Over in NYC : “Every day in New York I kept having moments of good luck, but assembling those moments into a new life was my job. All I needed was to go ahead and work it.” Yes, like the Missy Elliot song.
On the Community Created Around Karaoke: “It’s a temporary but intense bond between strangers, a shipboard romance, a republic we create where we gladly consent to treat the other people around us like rock stars.”
On the difference between performers and the rest of us: “We need them to be somebody. And occasionally, we need to be them so we can be somebody, too.”
On the Karaoke Room: “The modern machinery of the karaoke room brings out something undeniably personal in the song: emotional feedback on a timeless wavelength.”
On the Karaoke Scenes in Movies: “Every flick had one, from romantic comedies to crime thrillers. These scenes always work because they combine emotional exposition with the basic pleasures of watching famous people do stupid shit. It’s an easy three or four minutes of filler to throw into any screen narrative, with a guaranteed payoff, whether it’s going for quick laughs or quasi-unironic poignancy. It’s like putting a horoscope in a magazine or cat photos on your blog; it’s so automatically effective, requiring zero effort or ingenuity, it seems stupid not to do it.”
On the Karaoke Scenes in Movies (also): “Because karaoke is a dip into the unreal, the unrealness of the movie catches up with the unrealness of the scene and they coalesce into a moment of oddly convincing emotional truth.”
On Karaoke: “Music isn’t an accessory to a lifestyle – it’s part of a life. It’s not a youthful phase you go through. And that’s one of the reasons karaoke got so big. There’s no way to age out of karaoke. It doesn’t recognize time or history. All music, whenever it came from, whoever made it, it’s all right now.”
On Karaoke (also): “The karaoke mentality brings out that hammy Vegas over-the-top-belter in your soul. Karaoke is not the venue to get mellow or introspective; it’s no place for James Taylor or Carole King or Paul Simon, much as I love them. You have to bring the Neil [Diamond]. It makes you engage with your own emotions on a more extravagant level. And when that spills over into your everyday life, it brings out the sequins in your soul.”
On the Karaoke Universe: “In the karaoke universe, we can be whoever we want. We express ourselves by turning into colorful and disastrous parodies of pop stars who are already appalling parodies of human beings, and somehow that’s how we end up as our most sincere version of ourselves. When you step into the song, you’re not sure who you’re going to be on the other side.”
On the Meaning of Karaoke as “Empty Orchestra”: “The kara in the word karaoke is the same as the one in karate, which means ’empty hand.’ They’re both ’empty’ arts because you have no weapons and no musical instruments to hide behind – only your courage, your heart, and your will to inflict pain.”
Rob Sheffield on the Only Reasons to Get Obsessed with Anything: “What else in life is there to obsess about? There be music, and there be girls. Everything else is paste.”
On What His Dad Taught Him with Shaving: “Work doesn’t get finished, and neither does play. You start over every day, and what you don’t shave off today will be waiting tomorrow, until you run out of tomorrows and leave behind more work for others to do. You fight the sensation of getting overwhelmed by the repetition of things. You build up some momentum but you don’t get a climax. You don’t even know if you’ve done your day’s work right, because nothing’s ever really done. That’s very disconcerting to me.”
Rob’s Dad Bob on Keeping a Marriage Together: “Well, it’s heaven if you marry the right one, and it’s hell if you marry the wrong one, and you don’t find out which one you got until it’s too late.”
Rob Sheffield Quotes On Bowie
I have further notes on this book that I will post.
Rob Sheffield on Bowie (I think was about the Aladdin Sane album): “The lyrics are mere cutups, or maybe even placeholders he didn’t get around to finishing, but the vocals are so seductive that the sinister mood builds throughout the songs.”
I feel like so much of my own writing is full of placeholders for the things I’m not yet brave enough to say, or my ability and skill hasn’t quite caught up to the universal truths I yearn to convey.
On Bowie and American Girls: “The kind of stardom Bowie was playing with needed American girls to scream over it, otherwise it was just an art project.”
Much like the Beatles.
On Bowie and Glam: “Glam, as Bowie defined it, was a way of perceiving the world around you, as a first step toward remaking it, so it was key to wear things that had credibility as trash. Any kid could copy the look, and that was the point.”
We need to go back to this way of thinking.
On Bowie and How Music Changes Us: “That’s one of the things David Bowie came to show us—we go to music to hear ourselves change.”
On Bowie Inventing New Worlds: “He kept inventing new worlds just for the pleasure of changing them. And in doing so, he changed our world as well.” I’m always inventing and messing around. Clearly, I need to embrace the mess for what it is.
On Bowie, Artist as Fan: “He was the artist as fan, cheerfully presenting himself as an anthology of selves, a human mix tape listening to the world and echoing back his favorite bits, combining them into something new.” (On Bowie) Tay does something similar.
On Bowie’s Compassion: “For all his spaciness, it was his crackpot compassion that made him Bowie.”
On Bowie’s Song “She Shook Me Cold”: “He sounds funny and flirtatious and filthy, yet also awestruck by the metaphysical aspects of lust.”
That’s just a beautiful sentence.
On Brit Musicians and West Coast Girls: “For any band worth its salt of sleepy London Town, the motivation to write great songs was to stir the amatory nectars of the sun-kissed vestals of the West Coast, to attract those girls and reward them for their devotion.”
That’s a sentence that tells me I should quit writing and take up knitting…
On British Bands and the California Girls : “…the more fiercely the California handmaidens loved them, the better the bands got—a feedback loop that improved all our lives.” No kidding. Then a girl came along and realized teenage girls on the whole were the best target audience to create great music, and we got… yeah, you know who.
On David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”: “When his song is playing, that’s not just a radio – it’s Ground Control, picking up signals and random messages floating in from outer space. And you’re not a loser spending Friday night at home with the radio – you’re experiencing a night full of star-crossed romance and serious moonlight. 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.)”
Lots that I can riff on there.
On How Bowie wanted us to see him, especially in 1969: “… a rock and roll monolith sending our strange radio emissions, but otherwise emotionally inert—its origin and purpose still a total mystery.”
On Pinups: “The whole world is a box of pinups for you to ransack. I’d like to be a gallery, put you all inside my show.”
On the Bowie Song “Candidate”: “Walking through the streets makes you a candidate—the urban pedestrian as rock star, the flaneur as auteur. Every sidewalk is your stage.”
On the DJ’s Best Trick, Crossfade: “One song fading into another, that’s the DJ’s best trick. The cross-fade is as seductive as the songs themselves. Making a song happen, making it go away. Weaving songs together. Changing each song by what you play after it.”
On the Most Influential Bowie Incarnation: “It was the Berlin Bowie, rather than the Ziggy Bowie, who became the man’s most influential incarnation. Not just the way he used electronics, or how he mixed the drums, but the way he lived out every artist’s fantasy—blowing up your career, stepping away from your image, going strictly on your nerve, starting over and emerging stronger than ever.”
On the Similarities Between Astronauts and Performers: “Like an astronaut, a performer is driven by forces he can’t control to venture out into the unknown, maybe a hostile place.”
The world, sadly enough, is typically more hostile than it first appears, and yet, also much more isolating than people will often tell you it is.
On the World Without Bowie: “Planet Earth is a lot bluer without David Bowie, the greatest rock star who ever fell to this or any other world.”
On Why the Film “The Man Who Fell to Earth” Drags and Sucks: “Roeg is a still photographer at heart, with a sense for how a movie can look but no interest in how a movie can move, so his films are basically slide shows that drag on forever.”
Indeed, that movie is nice to look at, and the photography promoting it even provided photos for future Bowie albums. But the pacing sucks. Edited down to 90 minutes, it’d been a decent flick. Also, there was surprisingly not as much music as you’d expect.
Other Quotes by Rob Sheffield
On the First Time He Heard David Bowie on the Radio: “David Bowie ended life as I knew it one Sunday morning, entering my life the way a true prophet should – over a bowl of Fruity Pebbles.” (From “Talking to Girls About Duran Duran”)
That’s in the running for Greatest Sentence of All Time. Seriously, this book was just all the stuff that didn’t make it into his other books.
On the World Bowie Created Through His Music: “He created a night world of new romantics and modern lovers, populated by all the bizarre creatures he sang about. He was a kindly presence, a cracked pastor for all of us moonage daydream believers, pretty things and hot tramps, queen bitches and slinky vagabonds, people from bad homes, night crawlers and pinups and young dudes and scary monsters.” (From “Talking to Girls About Duran Duran”)
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More to come.
