Rob Sheffield
Rob Sheffield
Rob Sheffieldis an American music journalist and author...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth2 February 1966
CountryUnited States of America
precious-things
Celebrity despicability is a precious thing.
religious style looks
Madonna was so flamboyant in terms of her look, her style, her public pronouncements, her religious taboo-smashing.
growing-up nice people
One nice thing about growing up Catholic is it makes you open-minded about other people's religions, since ours is nuttier than yours.
song memories alive
Every moment of my life has a soundtrack, so I never know when some song is going to jump me by surprise and bring the memory alive.
america would-be culture
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.
girl sex stars
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.
heart play common-sense
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.
doctors triangles love-triangle
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?
song play band
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.
cheer sorry night
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.
song loneliness boys
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.
stars talking office
In the old days, when a star left a still-thriving hit show, they'd celebrate by killing him or her off. But 'The Office' dispatched Michael Scott in a crueler and more final way: they made him normal. Since we're talking about Michael Scott, 'normal' might be stretching it, obviously.
lonely kids way
'American Horror' is the debasement of the suburban family, the way a lonely kid would have imagined it in the Seventies.
new-york stars inspiration
Big Star invented a vision of bohemian rock & roll cool that had nothing to do with New York, Los Angeles or London, which made them completely out of style in the 1970s, but also made them an inspiration to generations of weird Southern kids.