Love Is a Mix Tape

I just finished reading Love Is a Mix Tape yesterday and I've got to say, it will be shelved as one of my favorites. The way Rob Sheffield is able to explain life through song is truly a gift. This is one of the those books that makes you laugh one chapter and cry in the next.

A few of my favorite excerpts:

* "Rick James helped me understand the lesson of the eighth-grade dance: Bitch power rules the world. If the girls don't like the music, they sit down and stop the show. You gotta have a crowd if you wanna have a show. And the girls are the show. We're talking absolute monarchy, with no rules of succession. Bitch power. She must be obeyed. She must be feared."

* "There are all kinds of mix tapes. There is always a reason to make one...
  -The Party Tape
  -I Want You
  -We're Doing It? Awesome
  -You Like Music, I Like Music, I Can Tell We're Going to Be Friends
  -You Broke My Heart and Made Me Cry and Here Are Twenty or Thirty Songs About It
  -The Road Trip
  -No Hard Feelings, Babe
  -I Hate This F***ing Job
  -The Radio Tape
  -The Walking Tape..."

* "I have built my entire life around loving music, and I surround myself with it. I'm always racing to catch up on my next favorite song. But I never stop playing my mixes. Every fan makes them. The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with - nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of a life."

* "What is love? Great minds have been grappling with this question through the ages, and in the modern era, they have come up with many different answers. According to the Western philosopher Pat Benatar, love is a battlefield. Her paisan Frank Sinatra would add the corollary that love is a tender trap. The stoner kids who spent the summer of 1978 looking cool on the hoods of their Trans Ams in the Pierce Elementary School parking lot used to scare us little kids by blasting the Sweet hit 'Love Is Like Oxygen' - you get too much, you get too high, not enough and you're gonna die. Love hurts. Love stinks. Love bites, love bleeds, love is the drug. The troubadours of our times all agree: They want to know what love is, and they want you to show them.  But the answer is simple. Love is a mix tape."