Rob Sheffield
Rob Sheffield
Rob Sheffieldis an American music journalist and author...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth2 February 1966
CountryUnited States of America
cbs changed difference evening experience mix people strange watching
Watching the evening news in 2011 is a strange time-travel experience. 'The CBS Evening News,' 'ABC World News' and 'NBC Nightly News' haven't changed their style over the decades, still going for that old-fashioned mix of voice-of-authority pomp and feel-good fluff. The difference is that people aren't watching.
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When Ke$ha tries to rap like L'Trimm, she sounds like any ordinary lonely teenage girl stuck in a nowhere town, singing along to her radio and dreaming of a party where she's the star. Ke$ha's greatness is that in her voice, you can hear both the loser girl and the star. All hail the Queen of Noi$e!
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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.
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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.
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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!'
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Movies for adults sucked in the 1980s, and music for adults sucked even worse; whether we're talking about Kathleen Turner flicks or Sting albums, the decade's non-teen culture has no staying power at all.
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It's easy to see why 'American Horror' is freaking people out. The ultraviolent hallucinations never pause long enough to make sense. In terms of coherence, it makes your average David Lynch movie look like 'Burn Notice.'
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Do you believe in Madonna? Because Lady Gaga has got something to say about 'Express Yourself,' and she's turned Madonna's fourth-best single of 1989 into her own instant-classic club anthem, 'Born This Way.'
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Every now and then, Prince decides to try being a normal rock star. You know, the kind who does a professional arena tour where he plays the hits. But part of what makes him such an eternally fascinating star is that he lives in his own private purple world, even when he sets out to make the house quake.
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Loving Duran Duran has been one of the constants of my life, but I have no idea what they would sound like if the women in my life stopped loving them. I guess I'll never know. I could claim that Duran Duran taught me everything I know about women, but that's not exactly accurate: I learned it from listening to girls talk about Duran Duran.
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Lots of people like Seth MacFarlane. Many other people like watching the Oscars. But nobody likes both, not even Seth MacFarlane, who has no idea what the Oscars are.
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One of the things that make Liars so fascinating after five albums, each one so completely different from the others, is that even though they play around with all the classic tropes of art-damaged angst-noise perv-rock, they exude a totally cheery and boyish enthusiasm onstage, goofing around with their keyboards and beatboxes.
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'Drive,' that's the one. I love dozens of songs by R.E.M., but that's the one, even though it took me 7 or 8 years to start liking it.
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Thanks for existing, R.E.M. It's hard to overstate how much these guys changed everything, creating an entire rock audience in their own image.