Suzanne
Rating:
Review
Rob Sheffield's memoir on growing up during the 1980's is a musical trip through time. He captures the pop culture of the eighties very well and takes us back to old hit songs by David Bowie, Culture Club, Prince, The Psychedelic Furs, the J. Geils Band, and countless more. It makes an amusing read for the rest of us who were teenagers then. I have to admit I was a little surprised to discover that someone as cool as a columnist for Rolling Stone was as awkward and clueless as the rest of us in junior high and high school and even beyond. Music always played a bigger part in his life than it did in mine - Duran Duran definitely does not keep coming up in my conversations, for instance! But I enjoyed reliving the huge onslaught that was MTV, and tagging along on Rob's teenaged interactions with girls and everyone else. The way he describes his Irish Catholic adolescence, he was always the friend instead of the boyfriend. I especially enjoyed his chapter on dancing in Spain during the course of a student exchange program, where he got to hang out with a whole group of girls. I was never dying to pick the book back up, but it was agreeable when I did and fun to remember all those bands and all those songs.
Best Line:
"It was like I found the Shroud of Turin in my sock drawer." (pg. 67)
KimRating:Review
Set during the totally awesome decade of the 1980s, the author recounts his formative teen-age/young adult years listening to, loving, learning and making mix tapes to much of the infectious music that came out during those radical years. A mere child of 13 when 1980 came into power (Ha! I was 14!) Mr. Sheffield is growing up outside of Boston in a large Irish Catholic family, and he is given plenty of encouragement to develop his absolute devotion to 80s music by his parents, sisters, friends and school mates. Each chapter is cleverly titled with a song from the 80s, and we are treated to a memorable time in the author's life during those heady times of sex/drugs/rock-n-roll-infused songs that played on our radios, and their corresponding videos made MTV a great way to waste hours of time. Some people may question how he can remember where he was and what he was doing when so many of these songs came out, but he does and documents it well. One of my favorite things in the whole wide world is music from the 80s. Hair bands, arena rock, those sexy all-guy and all-girl bands, punk wannabes, he and I love them all. So Mr. Sheffield had a captive audience in me, yes? Oh definitely, yes. This is a fun read, though I wish I would have read the author's first book,
Love is a Mix Tape before this one, but only because I wondered about some of the people in his life.
Best Line:
"I had no idea what either "reportedly" or "bisexual" meant, but I knew now that rock and roll was as sinister and excellent as I always feared it was."
