Top 50 Rob Sheffield Quotes

Why are Franz Ferdinand the perfect live band? They just are.

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.

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.

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.’

‘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.

You can’t beat the beehive for glam punkette attitude.

One of the billions of things I love about Beyonce: The harder she tries to come on crazy, the less crazy she sounds.

Every American wants a clean slate, but nobody wants to lose what they’ve got.

God bless America – what other civilization would give Patrick Dempsey another shot to rule as a sex symbol, twenty years after ‘Meatballs III: Summer Job?’ His reign as Dr. McDreamy on ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ is proof that there’s nothing we love more than giving Eighties celebs a heartwarming second stab at life.

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.

Like most fans of ‘So You Think You Can Dance,’ I wouldn’t know a pasodoble if it beat me with a rake.

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.’

It was in that bubble after Vatican II when it seemed like the best time ever to grow up Catholic. It was a time when the church was so connected to the world.

In the old days, when a star left a still-thriving hit show, they’d celebrate by killing him or her off. But ‘The Office’ dispatched Michael Scott in a crueler and more final way: they made him normal. Since we’re talking about Michael Scott, ‘normal’ might be stretching it, obviously.

‘The Queen Is Dead’ is not merely the Smiths’ best album, but it is one of those timeless, perfect, inexhaustible artifacts that could only have been made by a gang of sullen, sun-deprived rock & roll boys fighting off adulthood tooth and nail.

Celebrity despicability is a precious thing.

Every moment of my life has a soundtrack, so I never know when some song is going to jump me by surprise and bring the memory alive.

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.

But MTV relishes its vestigial role as a star maker, so every year it puts all its clout into making the VMAs the biggest, splashiest, loudest show-biz extravaganza of the year, honoring all this music for existing, after a year of paying barely any attention to it.

It’s kind of amazing how popular ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ is. What other show can boast such an annoyingly sincere cast of doctors, sniveling through such perfunctory love triangles?

On ‘Idol,’ Steven Tyler will be sitting at a table with two other judges, and part of his job will be keeping his yap zipped while they talk. This makes no sense at all, since Tyler has zero yap-zipping skills.

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.

The main job requirement for a network-news anchor is thinking it’s the only important job in the world. This is a field where solemn gravitas isn’t a drawback; it’s the whole point.

Anyone watching ’30 Rock’ always knew Tina Fey was playing a fictionalized version of herself, a workaholic comedy writer who also plays one on TV. She’s the boss; Liz Lemon just works here.

You’d think if anyone could charm America into caring about the evening news, it would be Katie Couric, the Tri Delt from Virginia who became America’s sweetheart on the ‘Today’ show. But her ratings have been dismal – she comes in last place every week.

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!

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.

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.

One of the best moments of any Liars show is hearing the crowd squawk ‘We’re doomed! We’re doomed!’ on cue during ‘We Fenced Other Houses with the Bones of Our Own.’ Maybe not the most uplifting audience sing-along in the indie rock world, but one of the most reliably entertaining.

Thank you for the music, Sleater-Kinney. This gang of three was the best American punk rock band ever. Ever.

Rebecca Black might sing like a robot, but that’s just proof she has evolved beyond us. Her vocal is just a slightly exaggerated version of the robot glitch-twitch stutter that’s been mainstream pop vocalese for the past 10 years or so.

Our amour fou with ‘The Sopranos’ is headed for long-term parking, like so many of its most memorable characters. We’ll never see a show like this again.

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.

‘American Horror’ is the debasement of the suburban family, the way a lonely kid would have imagined it in the Seventies.

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.

The first season of ‘Community’ stumbled a bit because the plotlines too often veered into realism, but that is not a problem anymore. Not when prize episodes concern a campuswide blanket fort, or a secret garden with a magic trampoline.

Hometown Aerosmith fans are different from other Aerosmith fans, and that mainly has to do with Joe Perry. It’s tough to overstate his strange grip on the local psyche. Tyler is a star who belongs to the whole world, but Perry, that dude belongs to Boston.

One nice thing about growing up Catholic is it makes you open-minded about other people’s religions, since ours is nuttier than yours.

That’s the secret of ‘True Blood’ – all the creatures that roam Bon Temps become a metaphor for our insatiable lusts and inner desires. Humans craving what they can’t have and those secret appetites transforming them into beasts, or even killers.

We all get as miserable as Erika M. Andersen sometimes, but we rarely approach her musical-ideas-per-miserable-minute ratio.

Most of an award-show host’s job is showing up and keeping a cool head and soldiering through it, whether it’s the Oscars or the Hallmark Channel’s ‘Hero Dog Awards.’

Baseball’s Opening Day is full of time-honored traditions: the President throws out the first ball, the Cubs’ starting pitcher walks away with a 54.00 ERA, the Royals get mathematically eliminated from the pennant race.

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!’

It was R.E.M. who showed other Eighties bands how to get away with ignoring the rules – they lived in some weird town nobody never heard of, they didn’t play power chords, they probably couldn’t even spell ‘spandex.’ All they had was songs.

That’s the rub about ‘Community’ – for all the high-concept cleverness, it really comes down to vulgar humanism, the dumbest kind of sentimental identification. We watch it because we like these people and we miss them when they don’t show up. They become part of the stories we tell ourselves.

It goes without saying that ‘Buncha Losers’ comedies speak to tough times. The massive unemployment of the Reagan years gave us ‘Taxi,’ ‘Cheers’ and the genre-defining ‘Night Court,’ a show you could never admit to watching without making people feel sorry for you.

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.