Quotes by Rob Sheffield

“bitch power is the juice, the sweat, the blood that keeps pop music going. Rick James helped me understand the lesson of the eighth-grade dance: Bitch power rules the world. If the girls don't like...”

“We want to freeze the perfect moment, hold on to it, at least long enough to understand it. But it dances on with us or without us, so we jump in and try to keep up. The universe is expanding and w...”

“Renee loved to do things. That was mysterious to me, since I was more comfortable talking about things and never doing them. She liked passion. She liked adventure. I cowered from passion and talke...”

“At Camp Don Bosco, there were Bibles all over the place, mostly 1970s hippie versions like Good News for Modern Man. They had groovy titles like The Word or The Way, and translated the Bible into c...”

“Back home, my favorite part of Mass was during communion, when I'd stand at the rail and hold a little gold platter under people's chins. The pretty girls would line up for communion (I confess to ...”

“Monogamous musicians are like vegan hockey players.”

“I was helpless in trying to return people's kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that's for sure. Cruelty isn't that hard to understand. I had no trou...”

“The way I pictured it, all this grief would be like a winter night when you're standing outside. You'll warm up once you get used to the cold. Except after you've been out there for awhile, you fee...”

“I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language. Without her to talk to, there was nothing to say.”

“On the way we talked about the road sign Bridge Ices Before Road. I always wondered, If that's a problem, why don't they just build the bridge out of the same stuff they use to build the road? Drem...”

“It was bewildering and humbling to keep discovering how many brave things people can fail to talk themselves out of doing.”

“The bassist -- always the bassist.”

“But bringing people together is what music has always done best.”

“When I was a junior, my school introduced badminton, which was clearly a P.E. department ploy to get me away from the wrestling room, and it worked, since the first time I played badminton was like...”

“I had never been so extravagantly proud of having blood that clotted.”

“Something I really enjoy about older couples is that they really have given up on getting everything right. They don't sweat the imperfections.”

“.For instance, I hated Pearl Jam at the time. I thought they were pompous blowhards. Now, whenever a Pearl Jam song comes on the car radio, I find myself pounding my fist on the dashboard, screamin...”

“Being a pop fan is a lot like Catholic devotion - lots of ritual, lots of ceremony... We touch the icon to enter the sacred space, genuflecting to reliquaries and ostentatoria that make something s...”

“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 ...”

“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...”