This review’s content may be confusing, annoying, trite or downright laughable to persons not born between 1965 and 1978. Hell, it may be all of that and more to just about anyone. Consider yourself warned.Put your thinking caps on ‘cuz I’ve got some trippin’ down memory lane for you:Where were you when you first heard ‘A Day in the Life’? What about ‘Wild World’? What did you think when you finally understood the meaning of ‘She Bop’? What does ‘My Heart Will Go On’ mean to you? Do you know where you were when you heard that Kurt Cobain was dead? What about that guy from Alice in Chains who wasn’t found for like days, rotting away in his apartment, do you remember that? What was the song that was playing the first time you slow danced? Does ‘Darling Nikki’ make you blush? What’s the most important song that you’ve ever put on a mix tape?Okay, enough. You get it. It’s just overkill now. Confession time: I was a groupie. I was. Really. Duran Duran was my group of choice. Those bastard fans in Wham! and Culture Club were pussies compared to us Duranies. We knew how to obsess. There is still a bond among us. Whenever I meet a woman born around 1970, I know that I can slip in a ’Save a Prayer’ reference and our eyes will meet and there will be that conspiratorial nod... We know that we both cried when we saw the ‘Feed the World’ video and that they were robbed (ROBBED!) of air time. Damn Bono. It wasn’t until I met my future husband that I actually LISTENED to Duran Duran. Those bass lines are awesome! I knew I loved John Taylor for more than his bangs and impeccable fashion sense! I never knew that certain instruments made certain sounds. I was just used to the end product. I’ve been told I’m a sucker for a good ‘bridge’, whatever that means. Maurice was also the first male friend that actually liked Duran Duran and didn’t mock me for my past transgressions. Boys can be so dumb. Don’t you know that we’ll like you more if you admit that you’ve sung along to Rio? Maurice actually brought me to my first Duran Duran show. We sat on the grassy lawn at Great Woods in Mansfield, Mass and rocked to Ordinary World and danced to The Reflex. I was so proud of him. How many boyfriends will do that? Okay. So, you see where I‘m going with this, right? I mean it’s so obviously clear. I may have been a groupie, but Maurice was a full out audiophile. To the point of annoyance.. We’d be out walking and he’d hear something from an open window somewhere and say ‘Oh! Zeppelin 4! Awesome! Did you know that Rolling Stone rated it only 66 out of the top 500 albums! What assholes!’ and then a rant would ensue and that would turn into some sort of ‘ultimate band’ fantasy. And so on. He would wake me up in the middle of the night to ask me what I thought about Geddy Lee’s vocals on ‘Caress of Steel’ versus ‘Fly by Night’. He wasn’t embarrassed to go total Wayne’s World when Bohemian Rhapsody came on while we were driving. My favorite was when we would play ‘who should have been on the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane?’ On our first date, Maurice ended it, not with a kiss, but a ‘I’m going to make you a mix tape!’ I was amused. I was concerned. I was somewhat petrified. This guy was a prog rock fan. Hadn’t I spent most of my adolescence mocking Rush and Yes? Is this karma taking a bit ol’ dump on me? He mailed me the tape. I was living in Boston at the time, he was in the boondocks of NH. I held it. I read the songs. I put it on my desk. I went out for ice cream. Around day 3, I finally had the room to myself (living in a boarding house with 40 other woman, that was a feat) and carefully placed it in my boom box. The first song was ‘Sweetness’ by Yes. ’Honey Pie’ by The Beatles, ’She’s a Rainbow’ The Rolling Stones, ’Come up and See Me (Make me smile)’ by Duran Duran, ‘It’s a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl' by Faust, The Musical Box by Genesis: She's a lady, she's got time,Brush back your hair, and let me get to know your face.She's a lady, she is mine.Brush back your hair, and let me get to know your flesh.Not. Very. Subtle. Anyway, this book. This could be Maurice and me. I know that some people dismiss Rob Sheffield and I don’t know enough about him to say that that’s okay. Maurice would probably know… he knew all the rock critics. But, this story… these mix tapes. They spoke to me in a completely sappy selfish way. I see a lot of Maurice in Rob. Another confession: I don’t read the blurbs about books before I start them. If I like the title or the cover or someone said ’You should read this’, I will go with that. I had no idea that this was a sad love story. (Yeah, I know… the title is ‘Love is a Mix Tape: Life and loss, one song at a time’ --I didn’t really catch the loss part. There’s Rob. Then there’s Rob and Renee and then there’s RobinRenee and then there’s just Rob again. There’s a part where he’s talking about just being Rob again: “I now get scared of forgetting anything about Renee, even the tiniest detail, even the bands on this tape I can’t stand--if she touched them, I want to hear her fingerprints.“ I wonder if Maurice ever thought things like “I suddenly realized how much being a husband was about fear: fear of not being able to keep somebody safe, of not being able to protect somebody from all the bad stuff you want to protect them from. Knowing they have more tears in them than you will be able to keep them from crying.” I know that I did. Rob relates almost everything through music. He reminds me a lot of Rob Fleming from Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. The guy that always has headphones on, that totally judges you by your cd collection, that has a song for everything. Maurice was always gently forcing me to like his music. I’m a whiny guitar alternadude type of gal. Play me some REM or Blind Melon or Polyphonic Spree. I would get in the car and find a cd in the player and suddenly I’m listening to Argent’s ‘Hold your Head Up’ or ‘Karn Evil 9 1st Impression Pt, 1 & 2’ by ELP. This went on for TWENTY years…. He never tired of it. I have milk crates full of Maurice creations. I can identify with these people. I would strike back with some of my own and we would argue during long car rides what was neutral ground. ELP was out. Genesis was neutral. Poi Dog Pondering was out. INXS was neutral and so on… I guess that what I’m trying to say is that this book might not be for every one. The minute gestures and pop culture commentary might annoy people. They may not laugh where I laughed or cried when I cried. That’s okay. There are other books. I’m just glad that I had the opportunity to read this one. I feel less alone and that’s a biggie for me. “They always end with our favorite song “Killer Parties” and sometimes I think, man, all the people I get to hear this song with, we’re going to miss each other when we die. When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.”I can’t think of a truer sentiment. Maurice is the Smashing Pumpkins ‘1979’ when I’m driving on a warm spring night with the windows down. He’s Nanci Griffith’s ‘Late Night Grande Hotel’ when I’m having a good cry in the tub. He’s Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name Of’ when I’m annoyed with hipsters. It sounds corny, but he gave me this gift and I’m so proud of him and so thankful. I miss you, Maurice.
I started reading this book during the two-day buffer between the beginnings of both 2012 proper and the working year, thinking that I’d have to look no farther than the other end of the couch if the story really destroyed me to the point of needing my myriad mostly-under-control-but-always-threatening-to-surface spousal fears allayed by husbandly hugs. Turns out, catching up on laundry and tidying up our soon-to-be-vacated first home ate into my reading time and I wound up finishing this about an hour after hubs left for work. (Luckily, this book wasn't the sob-fest I was fearing, which is a huge point for the "pro" column.)But you know what? That lost solitary reading time was put to good use. Hubs and I giggled our way through the brutal minute-long walk to the laundry room, encountered a comedy of errors while corralling our smallclothes and turned vacuuming into a contact sport. And I think that, more than actually sitting down with “Love is a Mix Tape,” helped drive home the unspoken point of the book, which is that you never know how much time you'll have with someone so you'd better make the most of the present. Every time I’ve seen Rob Scheffield waxing eloquent about music on television, he always seems to have this goofy grin and be a generally amiable person, an image which I’m sure is aided by how not pretentious he is about the music he loves (that's admittedly foreign territory to me). We can all agree that a personable demeanor is unusual for a rock critic and an avid connoisseur of music, right? Because you should believe everything you see on TV, I assumed he was a happy-go-lucky dude who just truly loves and is animated by music. So imagine my surprise when I realized there’s a heart-rending tale under all of that. This isn’t a prettied-up-for-mass-consumption account of an individual's personal tragedy that is just, like, so super unique and deserving of publication because the author said so, thank God. It’s about Rob. It’s about other things, too, of course – music being chief among them – but mostly how they’ve left distinct and indelible marks on Rob’s persona. Renee gets a lot of mention, but she’s a living, thriving presence for most of the book. The reader wouldn’t get the full extent of the things that made Renee so magnetic if this was another pity-party strutting its stuff for affirmations of the author’s suffering. Instead, Rob displays enough of his late wife’s traits and habits to make us understand her without betraying all of her secrets. We see Renee through Rob’s eyes: She’s flawed but good-hearted, quirky but grounded, an individual who’s bubbling over with life. It is so obvious that Rob is still smitten with Renee and probably has been since their first encounter. And it’s obvious that his love is motivated by who she is as a whole rather than what she represents to him. For someone with so little relationship experience, like Rob, that kind of selflessness is nigh impossible to either understand or execute. But you can tell that this boy is just wild about his girl by the way she’s framed within the book. A memoir like this should be more of a tribute and less of a fishbowl therapy session, and it should exist to deliver a message rather than parade the author's personal tragedies in morbid self-congratulation; thankfully, this one rises above the usual credibility-killing narcissistic pitfalls. There are no excessive displays of grief and Rob doesn't rely on his wife's death as the storytelling vehicle, as either would be disrespectful to Rob and Renee’s short-lived union. Rob mourns his wife, of course, accepts that he’ll never be rewarded for dealing with his widower status by getting to have Renee back, and spends an appropriate amount of time in the fetal position, but he does so with dignity. He doesn’t want to wallow in self pity or spend night after lonely night in a cemetery because to do so would be to succumb to a dismissal of Renee’s joie de vivre, which was clearly one of her defining attributes. There were definite divisions marking life before, during and after Renee, which certainly helped the story find a universally applicable element, but it’s Rob’s love of music that gives this books its strongest framework. Just like there was life with and without Renee, there’s music before and after Renee, too. For every milestone, be it as a child or a grieving adult, there’s a song or album or band to serve as the soundtrack. What is music’s greatest purpose if not to act as a personalized landscape for each individual, after all?As someone who went through a rabidly elitist phase of music consumption (a phase that has, fortunately, waned over the years but still needs to assert its lingering presence at the least appropriate times) and is drawn to those who’ve traveled a similar path, I feel pretty confident in saying that the least musically talented music aficionados aren’t the most accepting folks. It’s easy to scoff at pop music and the bands who create it but Rob doesn’t fall victim to this. He admits to secretly loving some disco ditties as a teenager and accepts his phases of enjoying some truly craptastic tunes. The mix tapes’ track listings that open each chapter illustrate that he never really let go of that open-mindedness, which make his honesty and vulnerability regarding other facets of his life that much more credible. He doesn’t limit himself to the music that’s peripherally cool or only listen to what the radio spoon-feeds him, which, to me, demonstrated an unabashed affinity for all music, much to his credit.One of the points that Rob subtly made was that when two people are just as sick about music as they are about each other, music gradually becomes a third entity in the relationship. Having that life raft of shared music (and, later, music he wishes he could share with Renee) is what kept the intimacy of his late wife close and, as I saw it, kept Rob from totally coming unglued. It always seemed like he knew he’d soldier on without his other half, but music seemed to be what kept propelling him forward, however stumblingly or reluctantly. Music does emerge as the real hero and great unifier when it comes to the crux of the story, though the quiet messages of human kindness and self-discovery serve as its moral. I held myself together through Rob’s accounts of Renee’s death and funeral and his mourning period; what finally pierced my groggy heart was Rob’s awe over complete strangers’ acts of kindness toward him. I’m a sucker for the moment the veil of cynicism is lifted (probably because I’m pretty certain humanity comprises a bunch of selfish jerks and, therefore, get all warm and gooey when someone can convince me otherwise for a little while), and Rob’s realization that he can’t go back to his former skepticism over the goodness of people was a defining moment of the story. Yes, there is some goodness in the world: It just took a world-shattering tragedy for Rob to gain some firsthand knowledge of it. Human kindness helped him to move on while pointing out the places where some silver lining is peeking through. It is hard to write about a loved one’s sudden death without summoning every cheaply sentimental cop-out to prey on the audience’s emotions, so Rob gets all kinds of kudos for offering up a good read rather than a cloying trick. This is a beautiful remembrance of a well-loved someone while doubling as a love letter to the music that will always be there through the highest highs, lowest lows and every small moment or long car ride between.
What do You think about Love Is A Mix Tape (2007)?
Life is filled with the most beautiful moments one can imagine but these beautiful moments could also end in some of the most painful times. Although this may be a scary concept that many avoid talking about, it is this reality that will set us on our path to enjoying these precious moments to the max. In the memoir, Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield, this concept of losing love and enjoying what you have while you have it is shown through the musically bonded love of two music journalist, Rob and Renee. Even though reading this memoir really had its impact on me, I don't believe this book should be mandatory for a high school readers to read, but should definitely be offered independently for its ability to grab the interest and hearts of the reader and give life to the idea of loving something as much as you can while you can. In this memoir by Rob Sheffield, through Rob’s original love for music he falls in love with love true love of his life, his wife Renee. After a short five years into their lives together married, Renee suddenly passes away on Mothers Day 1997. When looking back on his life and time spent with Renee, Rob is able to use their mix tapes they have created over the years to show the love they shared. Through songs by some of the, most famous bands who have ever lived these mixtapes show small things like their time spent cooking together in the kitchen to the time Rob spent in deep grievance, all alone after the loss of his wife. These mix tape that are quoted throughout the book are much more than just words to show their lives together, they symbolize a special moment in a specific time in Rob’s life. The idea of living life to the fullest and loving every moment of it can be seen by a man who can no longer love these moment when he says, “Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten.” Now that Rob has lost the love of his life he is unable to live for a more beautiful tomorrow and shows that he was at least able to make every moment the best moment of his life. The life lesson to be taken from this beautiful memoir has little to do with any educational values but a lot to do with personal experiences. This is specifically why I would recommend this book to be used by high schools more as an optional read because once this book is picked up it will be hard for the student to put it back down. Also, the lesson about living and loving what you are going through and have at this moment is cherish-able and important for any age group. Although a scary thought, we may have the world today but tomorrow we might not have a single thing so take the time now to cherish and enjoy it.
—N.miller
Any book that describes the summer of '94 as a series of drunken southern barbecues populated by mod-girls and indie rock dudes who always ended the party with the girls singing along to the entirety of Liz Phair's 'Exile In Guyville' on the back porch (word for word) while all the guys listened intrigued and obsessed and befuddled in the kitchen is A+ in my book. See also, the tragic passage inspired by Sleater-Kinney's 'One More Hour', the eulogy to the '90s, and the author's recipe for the perfect party. All in all, a really wonderful read. Fun, poignant, relatable, adorable, so '90s, so riot grrrl, and so successful in adding a deeper, introspective, human dimension to Rob Sheffield -- the coolest, if sometimes vapid -- member of Rolling Stone's waning pool of talent.
—Frank
Love Is A Mix Tape just absolutely knocked my socks off.I devoured this book in one weekend and enjoyed every single page, heartily. This is ostensibly a book about mix tapes, and looking back at a life spent seeing the world in a series of 45-minute vignettes (then, of course, you flip the tape over). Rob Sheffield has penned an honest (yet wildly entertaining) book that affected me more deeply than any book I've read in recent memory, woven throughout with a genuine and bleeding love for music. It's electric.The meta-theme of the book is great love, great loss, and the soundtrack: his relationship and marriage to Renee, a girl who he says was "in the middle of everything, living her big, messy, epic life, and none of us who loved her will ever catch up with her." Rob loved Renee, and chronicles that here beautifully from their first meeting to her sudden death at 31.Parts of the book are evisceratingly intimate. Sometimes I felt almost too close to his darkest and most intimate moments, and it's hard to phrase this right but -- because I knew so much of the music that weaves throughout their stories, I almost felt like I had a personal stake. I kept thinking that it was surprising to find a story so real and honest and intimate when I initially picked this up because, duh, it's about mix tapes.If you don't like reading about other people's love stories, you should still 100% read this book. Renee was his muse, but his passion (and hers) is thoroughly and unabashedly music -- and there is some absolutely fantastic stuff in here. He writes of their relationship, "We had nothing in common, except we both loved music. It was the first connection we had, and we depended on it to keep us together. We did a lot of work to meet in the middle. Music brought us together." They were both music writers and radio DJs, they fell in love hard and married young. They made lots and lots of fabulous mix tapes, and each chapter begins with a reprinted tracklist from one cassette from that era in their lives.This is a man after my own heart. How could I do anything but love a man who starts chapter 14 with: "Every time I have a crush on a woman, I have the same fantasy: I imagine the two of us as a synth-pop duo." He goes on to elaborate how she is in the front ("tossing her hair, a saucy little firecracker"), stealing the show and he is hidden in the back behind his Roland JP8000 keyboard, "lavishing all my computer blue love on her."He even lists all the best band names he's come up with for their synth-pop duo: Metropolitan Floors, Indulgence, Angela Dust.And you should hear him wax poetic about mix tapes. Be still my heart. Rob writes, "There are all kinds of mix tapes. There is always a reason to make one." He then gives his examples:The Party TapeI Want YouWe're Doing It? Awesome!You Like Music, I Like Music, I Can Tell We're Going To Be FriendsYou Broke My Heart And Made Me Cry and Here Are Twenty or Thirty Songs About ItThe Road TripGood Songs From Bad Albums I Never Want To Play Again. . . and many more. "There are millions of songs in the world," he writes, "and millions of ways to connect them into mixes. Making the connections is part of the fun of being a fan." The book starts with Sheffield pulling out a box of old tapes and all throughout the book --from his childhood school dance recollections, to the first mixes he can remember making for Renee, to the ones that accompanied him in the dark days and months following her death-- the mix tapes and the songs are as much characters in this story as the actual people are.Since each of us have our own completely sovereign and self-focused memories surrounding our favorite bands and favorite songs (the unique feelings, smells, companions, activities associated with them), there is something that I just find so ebullient about "seeing" all these bands and songs through the unique rubric of their lives. A MUST-READ.
—Heather
