Rob Sheffield

The thing I like about Rob Sheffield's music writing is that he eschews the distanced approach of music critics, and while he's writing as a fan, he's not writing a hagiography of his musical heroes. Instead, Sheffield writes about how fans engage with music and the artists that create it. This is particularly significant in Bowie's case as Bowie himself was a fan who never hid his influences, collaborated with many of his favorite musicians, offered support to young up and coming artists, show more and even on his final album took some inspiration from the much younger artist Kendrick Lamar. Bowie also engaged directly with his fans, treating them as special people, and encouraging their creativity. The funny thing is that Sheffield presents Bowie fans as the outcasts of society whereas I came to Bowie later in my life because when I was young I never felt cool enough to listen to Bowie. Regardless of how you come to Bowie, this is a great book with stories of his life and how he created his music.

Favorite Passages:

"Nobody enjoyed laughing at his humiliations more than he did."

"That's one of the things David Bowie came to show us -- we go to music to hear ourselves change."

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https://msarki.tumblr.com/post/160690210793/dreaming-the-beatles-the-love-story-...

It was never a pressing need for me to read any book about the Beatles. Born in northern Michigan in a small fishing town back in 1953, I grew up with them. It feels like only yesterday when as a thirteen year-old boy I made my way downtown to Loeffler’s Electronics to pick up my pre-ordered copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Band. It felt like precious cargo walking home with that LP tucked under my show more arm. When I placed it on the turntable in the basement a new world opened up for me. I had never heard anything like what my ears were now experiencing. These British pop stars had turned a new corner, one that was in some ways expected based on where their music had been going. But change is slow coming to a little town up north on Lake Huron. And I would never again be the same after my entire Beatle experience.

Dreaming the Beatles is a collection of essays telling the story of what this band means to a generation who grew up with the Beatles music on their parents’ stereos and their faces on T-shirts. I cannot imagine what that might have been like. I grew up in a home where even the mention of the Beatles was prohibited. The band’s first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show was cause for the future downfall of our country’s youth. My father was the president of our local School Board and the Iosco County News headlines one day soon after the first British Invasion abhorrently read, “Sarki says there will be no Beatles haircuts in Tawas Area Schools.” For years my three brothers and I were marshaled down to the basement for our customary two-week butch haircut. There we would squirm as our father cut away with his motorized shears, nicking our necks until they bled with regularity. But by the time Sgt. Pepper’s was issued there was no longer much that old Dad could do. Bangs were in and his boys were defiantly wearing them. Of course, I had a cowlick that prohibited a proper look. My style was more in tune with today’s spiked hair, except mine scrambled anywhere it wanted to except straight down.

As was predicted, mind-expanding drugs were introduced into my small town and the destruction of our youth became imminent. The Vietnam War certainly had something to do with it. Some of us survived. The Beatles for us were an everyday occurrence. Nothing existed without the Beatles’ mark upon it. Everything they said or did was reported and discussed. Hence the need for no further reading in a book about them. But now, so many years later, this title interested me. And the memories it brought forth were worth my time in reading it. The generations that came after ours have, and will have, their own set of experiences. But they will never be like our moments were back then, when British pop exploded in our bodies. And then it expanded and morphed into a world of psychedelic music, changing our minds forever, and opening us lucky ones to something bigger, more promising, and positively brighter. So come bless these boys in the band, and their passing that now-eternal audition. show less

Rob Sheffield is one of the last music critics standing and I knew he was a very vocal Swiftie. I feel like he could have made his thesis a little bit clearer, because Sheffield's whole thing is Grief, and there is a lot of Grief here (dead mom, funerals, a constant running list of all the places where he and his friends like to cry, with his escalating into some really intensely, almost violently disgusting urban hellscapes of fetid water, dead animals, etc -- but hey, it's New York, show more right?) but the thrust -- how Taylor Swift reinvented pop music, gets lost. And that is because she's an unabashed fan. Fan of a lot of things. Honest about it. Happy to talk about it. No pretending to be too cool to talk about anything. I did learn some things;

- Ne- Yo wrote Irreplaceable after thinking a lot about Faith Hill and Shania Twain.
- Nebrasterisk, an album made by a divisive artist that even skeptics appreciate. (Coined by Sean Howe)
- Cardi B told John Mulvaney he looks like the Pet Shop Boys on live television.

It still bothers me, almost 20 years later, that Rob Sheffield wrote a book about his dead wife and misspelled her home town through the whole thing. it's NORCROSS, GEORGIA, not NORTHCROSS, GEORGIA. When he officially retires from writing, or dies (which ever comes first), in my mind he will be the rock critic with the dead wife from a misspelled hometown who liked to sit next to fetid pools of water listening to Folklore on cassette and crying. show less

I am at best a casual Taylor Swift fan, so I was hoping that Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield could help me understand her unprecedented, global superstardom. I get that she's a smart, talented songwriter and a brilliant businesswoman, but how does she inspire such fan frenzy that her Eras tour has earned almost $2 billion? Sheffield doesn't fully explain the Swift phenomena, but his brief, poppy chapters offer a more or less chronological history of her music, with asides for most notable show more songs and quirks. The focus is firmly on Swift's artistry, not her boyfriends or other gossip. I'm fascinated by middle-aged, white, cishet Sheffield's unabashed confession that the lyrics of "Archer" from 2019's Lover ("They see right through me/I see right through me!") helped him process the grief of his mother's death.

Maybe we have a "vision-impaired person describing an elephant" phenomenon. Sheffield's connection to Swift is unique to him, and only by piecing together the impressions she has made on each one of her countless fans will we ever get to the core of her popularity. Perhaps she's just the right person at the right time, although the fact that "the right time" has now spanned more than 15 years is mindboggling. I suspect that Heartbreak Is the National Anthem will be too detailed for people who are only vaguely familiar with her work, and too basic for die-hard Swifties, but it was compelling enough to make me wonder what I'm missing by not having a Taylor Swift Spotify playlist. show less