Quotes from Rob Sheffield

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.

'The Voice' has lots of singers who fit the 'Idol' mold of young, innocent ingenues with psycho stage moms. But it also has long-suffering adult pros, with a whiff of thirtysomething despair in their voices. That adds an edge of realness.

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.'

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.

The key thing about LCD Soundsystem is that people always wanted this band to exist. For years, it was glaringly obvious that a band like this should exist, and people were impatiently waiting for them to show up.

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.

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.'

The 2000s were the time when bromance became a kind of love that dared to speak its name. As a high-water mark of bro culture, nothing can ever top the MTV series 'Bromance,' with Brody Jenner and his search for a new BFF.

Thanks to the greatest invention of recent years, the MP3-playing alarm clock, I can now choose the song that wakes me up in the morning.

When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free.

I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.

The bassist -- always the bassist.

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

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.

When I started out as a music journalist, at the end of the 1980s, it was generally assumed that we were living through the lamest music era the world would ever see. But those were also the years when hip-hop exploded, beatbox disco soared, indie rock took off, and new wave invented a language of teen angst.

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!'

'The Sopranos' gets praised as novelistic, but it follows the most banal of life patterns, showing the sheer tedium of being a mobster. It has dead spots, boring plotlines, weak episodes. Characters develop slowly, or don't. Like viewers, a gangster might get bored, fade out of the action, then come back to find none of his debts forgotten.

...some people aren't worth the trouble of being kind to, because they have neither the brains nor the power to make something for themselves out of your kindness.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus is just perfect in 'Veep.' She gets to show off the spiky claws beneath her patrician finesse. The obvious way to play 'Veep' would be to make Louis-Dreyfus a folksy heroine, one with more common sense or populist heart than her enemies. But she isn't one.

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.

In their heyday, the Pet Shop Boys were the Interpol of the Eighties, dressing up to sing really weird pop songs about lust and loneliness in the big city. They're low-pro now, not retro-worshipped in the manner of Depeche Mode, New Order, or The Cure, but you can hear the reason why - these guys are too sad.

Celebrity despicability is a precious thing.

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?

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.