224 Quotes by Rob Sheffield

At an incredibly divisive point in pop history, Donna Summer managed to create an undeniable across-the-board experience of mass pleasure – after ‘Bad Girls,’ nobody ever tried claiming disco sucked again. It set the template for what Michael Jackson would do a few months later with ‘Off The Wall.’

We are kind people in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you pretend you don’t know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don’t need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can’t. I found myself forced to let go of all sorts of independence I thought I had, independence I had spent years trying to cultivate. That world was all gone, and now I was a supplicant, dependent on the mercy of other people’s psychic hearts.

Donna Summer would be remembered as a ground-breaking artist today even if she’d retired the day after she recorded ‘I Feel Love’ in 1977.

Singing what’s in your heart? Naming the things you love and loathe? You can get hurt that way. Hell, you will get hurt that way. But you’ll get hurt trying to hide away in all that silence and leave your life unsung. There’s no future without tears. Are you really setting your hopes on not getting hurt at all? You think that’s an option? You clearly aren’t listening to enough Morrissey songs.

You Like Music, I Like Music, I Can Tell We’re Going to Be Friends.

That Jim Morrison song gets it all wrong. People are strange when you’re a stranger, but it’s not because they ignore you – it’s when they notice you and smile, that’s when you realize you’re alone out here. Their kindness is what makes you notice how weak you are. That’s when you know it’s not the city’s fault, it’s yours. These people are in the same strange town, but they’re not letting the strangeness eat them up and turn them into robots. That’s just you.

This is what they call “hitting rock bottom,” and they call it that because it rocks.

I believe that when you’re making a mix, you’re making history. You ransack the vaults, you haul off all the junk you can carry, and you rewire all your ill-gotten loot into something new. You go through an artist’s entire career, zero in on that one moment that makes you want to jump and dance and smoke bats and bite the heads off drugs. And then you play that one moment over and over. A mix tape steals these moments from all over the musical cosmos, and splices them into a whole new groove.