Rob Sheffield Quotes & Sayings (Page 7)

“Ronnie Spector's hair was taller and meaner and scarier than all four Shangri-La's combined, plus the drummer from the Honeycombs. You just know her rat-tail comb was a switchblade.”

“'So You Think You Can Dance' comes on as a high-minded leap up the evolutionary ladder from other reality shows - on this one, you're supposed to learn something, and the guest judges are fellow dance professionals rather than actual celebrities.”

“People who wave digital cameras at shows are the same people who sit in front of you at hockey games and wear those giant foam-rubber fingers that say, We're number one!'”

“Seeing Taylor Swift live in 2013 is seeing a maestro at the top of her or anyone's game. No other pop auteur can touch her right now for emotional excess or musical reach - her punk is so punk, her disco is so disco. The red sequins on her guitar match the ones on her microphone, her shoes and 80 percent of the crowd.”

“The hottest trash-disco star in the world: Ke$ha! She has a lot in common with Kiss, actually, even spelling her name with a dollar sign the way Gene Simmons probably always wanted to.”

“Ah, the bond between English boys and California girls. For those of us who aren't either, it's a bond that fascinates and mystifies. So much of the world's favorite music comes out of that relationship.”

“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 splendid of our most secret desires and agonies.”

“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.”

“Hardly anyone liked R.E.M. who didn't like them way too much, so part of being an R.E.M. fan meant getting wildly overinvested and then feeling vaguely disappointed by whatever they did next.”

“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.”