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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
emotional
funny
lighthearted
reflective
relaxing
fast-paced
funny
reflective
medium-paced
I'm willing to give Sheffield (and Eric Weisbard) a pass and check out whatever they've written since they wrote one of my go-to books in college, the 1995 Spin Alternative Record Guide, and so far they haven't failed to come up with something worth reading. Some parts of this book are confusing (like that there's hint of coming from a family with money, studying abroad in high school, etc, but then also working a summer as a garbage man), and some of his affirmations about life just haven't been that way for me, for the most part there's some nice observations and nicely different approaches to how he's related to pop music in his life. The stuff about growing up Catholic was solid too.
funny
lighthearted
fast-paced
Great overview of music in adolescence. They quality of writing and the personal connection and feel really illuminates the need to talk about music mire than we do.
Full disclosure: I knew, I think, a maximum of three of the songs Sheffield name-drops in his second memoir. As neither an obsessive music collector or self-conscious retro-hipster (or, gasp, one actually born in the appropriate time period), eighties music is so utterly out of my wheelhouse as to seem alien. But Sheffield's self-effacing charm, rare in the memoir genre these days, more than makes up for my total inability to follow him down his glitter-caked rabbit hole. Sheffield is a dork through and through, but--and this is an important distinction--a nice dork who only wants to share his irrepressible dorkiness/love for Hayzi Fantayzee with us. A geek waxing enthusiastic on the great love of his life is a beautiful thing to see when the geek is Rob Sheffield, even if that love is weird eighties bands.
I enjoyed "Love is a Mix Tape" more, but still enjoyed this effort. Humorous, honest, and flush with just the right level of melancholy, it only lacks the structure of "Mix Tape". It's a bit more like a Klosterman collections of essays than "Fargo Rock City", but a comparison to Klosterman is intended to be a compliment.
I'm at the tail-end of the GenX/MTV generation (the original MTV, not the crap that's on now) while Rob Sheffield is at the beginning (we're about 10 years apart in age) but we have pretty much the same taste in music. I think I might have been too gleeful making a playlist out of the 25 songs that head up the chapters in Talking to Girls about Duran Duran (which is sort of like taping although I didn't have anyone to send tapes to....I just learned to cut things together for dance team stuff). While Sheffield's first book, Love is a Mix Tape, had me bawling by the end Duran Duran had me chuckling through every chapter. Loved it.
Written by a columnist for Rolling Stone, Talking to Girls is a beautiful love song to Generation X, filled with enough anecdotes and warm nostalgia to make anyone proud of their own awkward teenage years. Sheffield manages the right mix of longing and laugh-out-loud humor, reminders of a time when we were were all more innocent, even though the threat of nuclear war was all around us and the world at large seemed to be going to hell on a daily basis. Thanks, Rob, for helping me remember what a silly, yet awesome, decade it was to grow up in.
3.5 stars.
Fun, quick, and pretty funny at times. This would probably get a higher rating from me if it were more focused on the 90's rather than the 80's, because the nostalgia factor would be much higher. But Sheffield is a talented writer, and I love the way he writes about loving music, feels very much like Chuck Klosterman.
My only complaint on the audiobook is technical- I borrowed this in mp3 format from the library, and there were several chapters that seemed to end early because of skipping or clipping. It's the only time I've had that problem (and I've probably rented 6-10 mp3 audiobooks this way), and I hope this is an anomaly, rather than the beginning of a trend.
Fun, quick, and pretty funny at times. This would probably get a higher rating from me if it were more focused on the 90's rather than the 80's, because the nostalgia factor would be much higher. But Sheffield is a talented writer, and I love the way he writes about loving music, feels very much like Chuck Klosterman.
My only complaint on the audiobook is technical- I borrowed this in mp3 format from the library, and there were several chapters that seemed to end early because of skipping or clipping. It's the only time I've had that problem (and I've probably rented 6-10 mp3 audiobooks this way), and I hope this is an anomaly, rather than the beginning of a trend.