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219 reviews for:
Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut
Rob Sheffield
3.54 AVERAGE
219 reviews for:
Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut
Rob Sheffield
3.54 AVERAGE
This book was pretty interesting. They author was pretty funny, definitely made we want to live in the 80s. I really want to go look up some of the music he talked about.
I was obsessed with getting a copy of this book, and every time I couldn't find it I grew more and more obsessed with it. Sadly, it didn't need all that obsession from me.
I really related to The Smiths chapter, I also fell for them hard until the spell broke off when I did the awful deed of googling them. Even if Morrissey's voice is amazing and his songs can heal my aching teen heart, he's not the greatest person, as all musicians are. I owe it him that I don't google bands and singers anymore.
The chapter where Rob talked about his grandpa almost made me cry, I was reading it last night in a dinner at my uncle's where no one was paying me any attention, and I remembered that my father told me one of the things that bothered him most about growing up was that it was getting hard to cut his toenails. I felt a very strong connection at the moment, and tried to tell my father about what I felt but only managed a "How are you?" with no apparent emotion. I hope he knew what I meant.
I read a quote once: "While live happens, there is a song playing in the background, and while a song is playing, live is happening in its background." I think it sums up the point of the book. It's not about the music, not about the life, but about how they are each other's companions.
I really related to The Smiths chapter, I also fell for them hard until the spell broke off when I did the awful deed of googling them. Even if Morrissey's voice is amazing and his songs can heal my aching teen heart, he's not the greatest person, as all musicians are. I owe it him that I don't google bands and singers anymore.
The chapter where Rob talked about his grandpa almost made me cry, I was reading it last night in a dinner at my uncle's where no one was paying me any attention, and I remembered that my father told me one of the things that bothered him most about growing up was that it was getting hard to cut his toenails. I felt a very strong connection at the moment, and tried to tell my father about what I felt but only managed a "How are you?" with no apparent emotion. I hope he knew what I meant.
I read a quote once: "While live happens, there is a song playing in the background, and while a song is playing, live is happening in its background." I think it sums up the point of the book. It's not about the music, not about the life, but about how they are each other's companions.
Big meh. Read it if you want to remember some songs that should be forgotten (anything by Five Star).
*** 1/2
The 80's. If you lived it, you will like this book. Fun read.
The 80's. If you lived it, you will like this book. Fun read.
When I read Rob Sheffield's Talking to Girls About Duran Duran this summer, my friend Mary was never very far from my mind. This is the kind of book that I knew she would eat up (although not as much as Confessions of a Prairie Bitch, which she got for Christmas.) I had really loved Sheffield's bittersweet memoir of his young wife's death in Love is a Mix Tape and just reading about his newest book made me convinced I would love it just as much as I did Love is a Mix Tape.
Was I right? Yes and no. Talking to Girls About Duran Duran lacks the cohesiveness of his previous effort. Rather than tell one big story, Sheffield settles for telling a bunch of little stories from his adolescence and young adulthood. Each chapter is a new story and a new song. Sometimes the song relates specifically to the story, other times not. The thing I really appreciate about Sheffield is that he really really loves pop music. Reading his words, there's no mistaking it. He grew up just slightly ahead of me (he is six years my senior) so his pop music experience is one that is very different from mine. Additionally, his musical taste has a small sliver of overlap with mine. Even so, I related to it not so much based on the specifics of his story but because pop music was really in his genes. I recognized myself in more than a few spots.
There were so many different stories that to try to distill them into a short blog post is folly indeed. However, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the chapter that made me think of Mary the most - the chapter on the cassingle. Sheffield makes a strong argument that the short-lived format was an absolutely perfect format for the type of music that it contained. Introduced in 1987 and pretty much extinct by the mid 90s, songs like Tone Loc's "Funky Cold Medina" and Kriss Kross' "Jump" are as throwaway as the cassingle itself. I still remember the first cassingle I bought - Fleetwood Mac's "Everywhere." Why I did that I have no idea as I had already bought the album. The reason the chapter made me think so much of Mary is because one night nearly a decade ago, Heidi and I visited her at her apartment to ask her to be a godmother to our then unborn child. At some point during the night, she pulled out her cassingles and well, I was amazed. She had an amazing collection of cassingles, one that I'm pretty sure she still has.
My cassingles were taken to Good Will in a fit of decluttering madness several years ago. Sometimes I kind of regret doing that, but mostly I don't.
Talking to Girls About Duran Duran is an uneven but still worthwhile read. Lovers of pop music everywhere will find something that they can relate to. All I know is that anyone who can write so much about cassingles is on my list of "guys I definitely want to hang out with."
Was I right? Yes and no. Talking to Girls About Duran Duran lacks the cohesiveness of his previous effort. Rather than tell one big story, Sheffield settles for telling a bunch of little stories from his adolescence and young adulthood. Each chapter is a new story and a new song. Sometimes the song relates specifically to the story, other times not. The thing I really appreciate about Sheffield is that he really really loves pop music. Reading his words, there's no mistaking it. He grew up just slightly ahead of me (he is six years my senior) so his pop music experience is one that is very different from mine. Additionally, his musical taste has a small sliver of overlap with mine. Even so, I related to it not so much based on the specifics of his story but because pop music was really in his genes. I recognized myself in more than a few spots.
There were so many different stories that to try to distill them into a short blog post is folly indeed. However, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the chapter that made me think of Mary the most - the chapter on the cassingle. Sheffield makes a strong argument that the short-lived format was an absolutely perfect format for the type of music that it contained. Introduced in 1987 and pretty much extinct by the mid 90s, songs like Tone Loc's "Funky Cold Medina" and Kriss Kross' "Jump" are as throwaway as the cassingle itself. I still remember the first cassingle I bought - Fleetwood Mac's "Everywhere." Why I did that I have no idea as I had already bought the album. The reason the chapter made me think so much of Mary is because one night nearly a decade ago, Heidi and I visited her at her apartment to ask her to be a godmother to our then unborn child. At some point during the night, she pulled out her cassingles and well, I was amazed. She had an amazing collection of cassingles, one that I'm pretty sure she still has.
My cassingles were taken to Good Will in a fit of decluttering madness several years ago. Sometimes I kind of regret doing that, but mostly I don't.
Talking to Girls About Duran Duran is an uneven but still worthwhile read. Lovers of pop music everywhere will find something that they can relate to. All I know is that anyone who can write so much about cassingles is on my list of "guys I definitely want to hang out with."
There's not enough of a narrative thread to make this book as good as I wanted it to be but I did learn a lot about 80s music.
funny
informative
lighthearted
medium-paced
My favorite chapters/essays were the ones about singing karaoke (Chaka Khan), driving an ice cream truck (Prince), and helping his grandfather cut his toenails (Big Daddy Kane).
Rob Sheffield says the only two things worth obsessing over are music and girls. In this book he traces his dual obsession back to its roots. And I don't know of anybody who writes as engagingly on both of these subjects as Rob Sheffield. I'm about ten years older than him so I was obsessed with 70s bands not the 80s one that Rob loves. I honestly think I only know one Duran Duran song. But it doesn't matter; the feelings are universal. This book is worth the price just to watch Sheffield try to figure out Paul McCartney. "By the time he was 22, he knew for a fact that no whim would ever be refused him, whether it was sex, drugs, cars, gurus. Paul chose to be a husband. The Stones suggested that if you dabble in decadence, you could turn into a devil-worshipping junkie. Paul McCartney suggested that if you mess around with girl worship, you could turn into a husband. So Paul was a lot scarier."
Rob Sheffield is that really gangly looking guy who is always on those reminisce shows in Vh-1. This book of his is a personal memoir of his youth, touching on milestones in his life on a song by song basis. You know what, he's just a really likable guy.
Blast from the past entertainment if you were really into 80's music. Worth thumbing through to get to the 4 or 5 lines that actually made me laugh out loud. Overall, it was about twice as long as it should have been--which was apparently to showcase the author's masterful recollection of the lyrics to every song of the decade. Though I will be recommending my friend Kim read the chapter on New Kids on the Block....