Quotes from Rob Sheffield

The words "douche" and "bag" have never coupled as passionately as they did in the person of my thirteen-year-old self.

I made a new friend in the summer of 1999 who wore a rubber band around her wrist with Paul Westerberg's name written on it. Her favorite song was "Unsatisfied" and she gave the song back to me, without knowing she was doing it, and soon I loved it as much as ever.

She also told me about the night one of her astrophysics friends went to a bar trivia contest where the final question was "What does Kelvin measure?" The winning answer was "heat," but her friend explained that Kelvin measures temperature, not heat, since heat is energy and is measured in energy units like joules or ergs. The astronomer refused to back down, until the battle had to be settled with a chug-off. These astro people are hard-core.

If you freak out over trivial everyday grievances, how are you going to handle *real* problems?

As the musical philosopher Lil' Kim has noted, inside every man is a baaaad girl. And that bad girl can scare the bejeezus out of us. The lady makes demands.

I've been stuck in my little isolation chamber for so long I'm spinning through the same sounds I've been hearing in my head all my life. If I go on this way, I'll get old too fast, without remembering any more sounds than I already know now.

But right now, karaoke is one of the places where we go to form our own culture club, which is one of the millions of things a relationship is—building a shared language out of the things that fire up your blood. Couples need as many of those languages as they can get.

five). The Esher demos are a real treasure trove; they mined it for years. Songs that got worried to death on the album are played with a fresh one-take campfire feel, just acoustic guitars and handclaps

The songs were all either fast or sad. Because all songs should be either fast or sad.

But how do you start getting out of your room? I was reading a poem by my idol, Wallace Stevens, in which he said, "The self is a cloister of remembered sounds." My first response was, Yesss! How did he know that? It's like he's reading my mind.

There was an empty house on the other side of this drive, and I had no idea what it would be like to try to go inside it. There was nobody there. I wasn't driving back home—just back.

Fighting: As with most couples, probably, most of our fights were not about anything, but rather about fighting itself. We negotiated the rules, slowly, stupidly, over time. The word "sulk" got banned early on, in the summer of 1990. "Pout" was soon to follow. "Don't start" was banned in the fall of 1992.

They asked me what sonically I could bring to the table, and I told them about this new gadget I had just bought, the Eventide Harmonizer. They asked what it did, and I said, it fucks with the fabric of time.

As Iggy later recalled, in a typical week they'd spend two days drunk, two days nursing their hangovers, and three days straight—"which is a pretty good balance for musicians.

That's another reason for its fluctuating reputation: the Pepper that blew minds out in 1967 was mono, but later generations heard it in the diffuse, watered-down stereo mix, missing details like Paul's scatting at the end of the "Pepper" reprise. The mono version was the one the Beatles, Martin, and Emerick spent three weeks mixing. The stereo mix was a quickie afterthought, with none of the Beatles involved or even present

The only heroic act one can fucking well pull out of the bag in a situation like that is to get on with life and derive some joy from the very simple pleasure of remaining alive, despite every attempt being made to kill you.

Renee loved to do things. That was mysterious to me, since I was more comfortable talking about things and never doing them. She liked passion. She liked adventure. I cowered from passion and talked myself out of adventure.

I'd have too much John ("Oh Yoko!," "I'm Steppin' Out," "Oh My Love," "New York City," "Nobody Told Me") and too much Paul ("Jet," "Friends to Go," "Flaming Pie," "Too Many People," "We Got Married," "Simple as That," "Hi, Hi, Hi," "You Gave Me the Answer").

Ziggy was a requiem: Bowie came to bury the sixties, not praise them. He hit the road and toured like a madman, spreading the glitter gospel in a rock scene full of interchangeable flannel-and-denim sincerity pimps.

Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together and

will always ride hard for Mick's Paul phase, summed up by the compilation Through the Past, Darkly, with its awesomely ridiculous octagonal cover.

She would wake up in the middle of the night and say things like "What if Bad Bad Leroy Brown was a girl?" or "Why don't they have commercials for salt like they do for milk?

THE WHITE ALBUM IS THE BROKEN ALBUM, THE DOUBLE-VINYL mess, a build-your-own-Beatles kit forcing you to edit the album yourself. They even made the audience come up with the title. (Nobody has ever called it The Beatles.) In the predigital days, everybody made their own cassette for actual listening, with each fan taping a different playlist.

We have individual geekdoms that we've turned the other one on to and individual geekdoms we prefer to enjoy alone. There are also the geekdoms that inspire us to try to convert each other.