love is a mix tape by Rob Sheffield

No capitalization on the cover or the title page? Man after my heart. Cassette tapes as the cover illustration? Stop it. A memoir of an editor for Rolling Stone? Seriously....check, check, and check.

When I first stumbled upon this book, I was hesitant to even pick it up. My elitist and pessimistic self almost couldn't stand it. I purchased it before going to Wisconsin in the spring of 2008, and waited until I had fully settled in to start it. Almost 6 weeks later, wearing my headlamp after my campers had gone to sleep, I devoured this thing huddled in my mummy bag on the top bunk.

Filled with everything from anecdotes about cheeseball Top 40 to poignant passages on the connections between love, loss and lyrics, I can say with a bit of confidence that any true Hornby fan will delight in these pages as much as I did. With chapter titles like "tape 635", "sheena was a man", "dancing with myself" and "mmmrob", how could I not? I honestly found myself picturing Jim Knipfel with each arch and turn in the story. (um, hello...now I've got to do a review of Slackjaw.) AND there are mixes on printed cassette sleeves at the beginning of every chapter....c'mon now, you know you're intrigued.


As I've recently been reveling in the glory of all that is early 90s grunge, I'll leave you with a smattering of Sheffield's musings on Nirvana and their illustrious frontman (sparing you my vivid recollections of that fateful April day).

"Nobody was surprised, so nobody was depressed. People cracked jokes, even those of us who loved him. ...Renee and our friend Gina sang 'Kurt Cobain' to the tune of 'You're So Vain.' For people who were into music, which meant almost everybody hanging around all weekend, the Kurt Cobain who kicked it was the celebrity, as opposed to the guy who had written all the songs and sung them-the musician. The celebrity was dead. The guy who sang on the Unplugged special was a little harder to bury.
...The Unplugged music bothered me a lot. Contrary to what people said at the time, he didn't sound dead, or about to die, or anything like that. As far as I could tell, his voice was not just alive but raging to stay that way. And he sounded married. Married and buried, just like he says. People liked to claim that his songs were all about the pressures of fame, but I guess they just weren't used to eharing rock stars sing love songs anymore, not even love songs as blatant as 'All Apologies' or 'Heart-Shaped Box.' And he sings, all through Unplugged about the kind of love you can't leave until you die. The more he sang about this, the more his voice upset me. He made me think about death and marriage and a lot of things that I didn't want to think about at all. I would have been glad to push this music to the back of my brain, put some furniture in front of it so I couldn't see it, and wait thirty or forty years for it to rot so it wouldn't be there to scare me anymore. The married guy was a lot more disturbing to me than the dead junkie.
...when I listen to Kurt, he's not ready to die, at least not in his music-the boy on Unplugged doesn't sound the same as the man who gave up on him. A boy is what he sounds like, turning his private pain into teenage news. He comes clean as a Bowie fan, up to his neck in Catholic guilt, a Major Tom trying to put his Low and his Pin Ups on the same album, by mixing up his favorite oldies with his own folk-mass confessionals. I hear a scruffy sloppy guitar boy trying to sing his life. I hear a teenage Jesus superstar on the radio with a song about a sunbeam, a song about a girl, flushed with the romance of punk rock. I hear the noise in his voice, I hear a boy trying to scare the darkness away. I wish I could hear what happened next, but nothing did."