Nothing connects to the moment like music. I count the music to bring me back, or more precisely, to bring her forward.

Rob Sheffield

Categorized in : Moments

...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.

kindness brain people

It's always that one song that gets to you. You can hide, but the... by Rob Sheffield

It's always that one song that gets to you. You can hide, but the song comes to find you.

sheffield song

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.

common-sense play heart

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.

lust secret blood

'So You Think You Can Dance' comes on as a high-minded leap up the evolutionary ladder from other reality shows - on this one, you're supposed to learn something, and the guest judges are fellow dance professionals rather than actual celebrities.

dance inspirational reality

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

lonely kids way

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.

band play song

But the answer is simple. Love is a mix tape. by Rob Sheffield

But the answer is simple. Love is a mix tape.

tape simple love-is

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?

love-triangle triangles doctors

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.

memorable character long

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.

zero idols jobs

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.'

hero dog jobs

Like many other touchstones of twenty-first-century pop culture, 'The Sopranos' was hatched in the late Nineties, predicting a future that never arrived. It was designed for a decade that would be just like the Nineties, except more so, in an America that enjoyed seeing itself as smarter and braver and freer than ever before.

twenties would-be america

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.

mtv names bff

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.

magic community garden

'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.

queens fighting boys

Just as Bowie, Zeppelin, etc., became rock stars by remaking themselves in the image of the California girls, the Go-Gos became rock stars by pretending to be the Buzzcocks and the Sex Pistols. Jane Wiedlin always said her biggest influence was growing up in L.A. as a Bowie girl.

girl stars sex

It was bewildering and humbling to keep discovering how many brave things people can fail to talk themselves out of doing.

failing brave people

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.

loneliness song boys

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!

girl lonely dream